Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

deep.design

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 192 posts

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#21

Post by shostack »

Animats wrote: post #15

Worse is the "invisible x" menu. The one for the options that help the user but decrease revenue, such as "mark this item as spam". Facebook uses this a lot. (Mouse over a Facebook ad. A greyed-out "x" appears at the right of the ad. Mouse over the "x", and the grey turns darker. Click on the "x", and a menu comes up demanding to know why you didn't like that ad.) So does Youtube. (Those silly pop-ups on Youtube, if…

Except these don't actually "remove ads." They are meant to further train the algorithm on relevancy while providing the minority of users who use it a button that lets them feel like they are doing something about the annoying ads.

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#22

Post by JoshTriplett »

freshyill wrote: post #6

It is almost always preferable to have all of your options available to the user at all times. However, it's very important to make the distinction between apps and websites when talking about a hamburger menu. A tab bar is great in an iOS app with a limited scope of functionality. That just doesn't work a sprawling news site covering dozens of topics. A small, product-focused website may even be able to get away wit…

> That just doesn't work a sprawling news site covering dozens of topics.

Then have a menu named "topics" (or whatever marketing says to call areas of news). Still makes more sense than a menu whose icon means nothing more than "this is a menu" (and doesn't reliably convey that to everyone).

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#23

Post by natch »

I was inclined to dismiss this author's view on mobile design since they were saying "click" this and "click" that everywhere. On mobile, there is no clicking. Clicking is for when you have a mouse. On mobile there's tapping.

But. That being said, the article makes sense. Hamburger menus are where features go to die.

So if you want a feature used, I agree it should be brought forward in a different way.

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#24

Post by moron4hire »

freshyill wrote: post #6

It is almost always preferable to have all of your options available to the user at all times. However, it's very important to make the distinction between apps and websites when talking about a hamburger menu. A tab bar is great in an iOS app with a limited scope of functionality. That just doesn't work a sprawling news site covering dozens of topics. A small, product-focused website may even be able to get away wit…

What if we made the tab bar show the last 4 recently used items, plus "other" to open a drawer to show everything else? But if one of the top 4 is selected, it doesn't move within the list, it stays where it is.

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#25

Post by doczoidberg »

hamburger menu should only contain notbso often needed actions. There can be additional buttons in the GUI. Simple as that.

also most android apps support swiping from the border which gives the user a quick access to actions not using any space. The author doesn't mention it?

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#26

Post by JoshTriplett »

declan wrote: post #19

My co-founder and I debated whether to use the hamburger menu for our iOS and Android apps (currently in beta -- https://recent.io/ ). We decided to keep the hamburger menu on both platforms for launch. Our reasoning was that it's a common UI convention and our primary navigation options -- Home, Recommended, Hot News, Local News, and topics -- are visible in the extended app bar. An option to follow additional topic…

Could you integrate bookmarks and history into "home"? For instance, if home is supposed to be what's recent, history is a natural "less recent".

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#27

Post by mark_l_watson »

I like the hamburger icon because (I think) almost everyone who would read my web sites (technical stuff) knows what it is.

I agree that if the hidden menu has very few options then it is a good idea to have everything visible but that is not feasible for more than a few navigation options.

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#30

Post by shogun21 »

moron4hire wrote: post #24
freshyill wrote: post #6

It is almost always preferable to have all of your options available to the user at all times. However, it's very important to make the distinction between apps and websites when talking about a hamburger menu. A tab bar is great in an iOS app with a limited scope of functionality. That just doesn't work a sprawling news site covering dozens of topics. A small, product-focused website may even be able to get away wit…

What if we made the tab bar show the last 4 recently used items, plus "other" to open a drawer to show everything else? But if one of the top 4 is selected, it doesn't move within the list, it stays where it is.

It might be confusing for the user that the top navigation bar is constantly changing based on whatever item they happened to use last.
Post reply on HN