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The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

deep.design

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Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#31

Post by nthj »

shampine wrote: post #17
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…

I keep reading these articles about how awful hamburgers are but so far not a single one addresses menus that have more than 3-5 items. I manage sites that we have kicked around ideas for how to deal with the menu better, but the size of what is in that menu makes all the proposed ideas I've seen not feasible. So I'm right there with you that it is unfortunate, I wish these articles had more in way of solutions than…

Somewhere along the way I realized that design skill has as much to do with making convincing business cases for simplifying your business offering as it does with what design patterns we use. Approached this way, these types of articles help in the same way software design patterns do: perhaps refactoring the code will improve the smell, but its also possible we have an unnecessarily complex business problem ("50 more news categories than anyone will ever actually browse through", for example), and we need to make a case for simplifying the architecture.

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#33

Post by mark242 »

James Archer, author of the piece, is Chief Creative Officer of both Crowd Favorite, and Forty, both of which use -- surprise -- the hamburger menu in their mobile sites. Is this another case of "do what I say, not what I do"?

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#35

Post by [deleted] »

shampine wrote: post #17
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…

I keep reading these articles about how awful hamburgers are but so far not a single one addresses menus that have more than 3-5 items. I manage sites that we have kicked around ideas for how to deal with the menu better, but the size of what is in that menu makes all the proposed ideas I've seen not feasible. So I'm right there with you that it is unfortunate, I wish these articles had more in way of solutions than…

[deleted]

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#36

Post by dperfect »

Before hamburger menus became popular, weren't people complaining about the exact opposite problem? That is, if you break out the menu items into more prominent interface elements (e.g., tab bar items), then you're at risk of cluttering your visual design with less-common functions. As in all things design, I suppose a balance needs to be found, but I personally don't find anything wrong with a hamburger menu per se.

Almost everything has or needs something like a hamburger menu somewhere. Can it be abused? Yes. Does that make it inherently bad? I don't think so.

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#37

Post by moron4hire »

shogun21 wrote: post #30
moron4hire wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's what I mean by not moving an item if it's already in the top 4. Do most people use all of the features of any given app? I can see things like news sites being able to get by with this, as I suspect the general use case with news sites is to only have a few sections one cares about.

Or maybe it's a Markov chain! Move an item in the list by a random proportion weighted by how frequently that item has been used in the past! Infrequently used items have a low probability of making it into the most-recently-used list, where they would supplant more frequently used items.

Or more direct: just always sort items by how frequently they've been use over time, but never allow the top 4 to be rearranged, even if one of the "lower" items gets used more.

Or more simple: just let the user choose which items they want to pin to the front view.

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#38

Post by georgefrick »

mark242 wrote: post #33

James Archer, author of the piece, is Chief Creative Officer of both Crowd Favorite, and Forty, both of which use -- surprise -- the hamburger menu in their mobile sites. Is this another case of "do what I say, not what I do"?

I think it's the new world case of 'I sold you solution X, now it's time for solution Y'.

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#40

Post by declan »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #26
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".

Thanks for the suggestion! I don't think either of us had thought of that.

Inside the app, Home is a starting point that lets you see your news highlights at a glance. It does seem like the concept could be broad enough, as you say, to support history and bookmarks...

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