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The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

deep.design

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Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#131

Post by Dylan16807 »

function_seven wrote: post #96
ams6110 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't understand double click either. I know people who double click everything - buttons, hyperlinks, everything.

Yeah, me too. And its amusingly frustrating to watch. And we know why double-clicking is a thing, and why it's not consistent across widgets, but I wonder if we'd be better off if the mouse originated not with "left" and "right" buttons, but instead "do" and "select" buttons. The Do button would open the files and visit the hyperlinks, the Select button would add the object you're looking at to a stack of selections,…

Shouldn't you also have a third button to list available actions, or would you throw that away? Overloading the select button would be just as confusing; I hope you don't want to do that.

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#132

Post by smt88 »

pbreit wrote: post #130
nkassis wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that? What makes the web different in this case?

Basic, significant factors like screen real estate, input devices & processor speed.

If you read the reasoning against the hamburger menu (i.e. it is basically a "misc" option that doesn't indicate its contents), then you'd know that none of those factors matter here. Screen real estate isn't even usually a difference between web/native.

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#134

Post by kazinator »

The desktop Firefox has one of these. It's been quite unintuitive. It contains some commands depicted by icons, which constitute an overlapping set of the functionality under the regular F)ile menu, like "New Window", "New Private Window", "Print" and whatnot. But there are commands that appear in other menus: the monkey wrench Developer icon appears to have similar content to "Tools/Web Developer".

I think what we are supposed to understand is that this Firefox Hamburger Menu (FHM) is really a TOA: Toolbar Overflow Area. It's a repository of icons for doing arbitrary things.

Its Customize button at the bottom invokes exactly the same UI as View/Toolbars/Customize: a big view where you can move icons between an editable version of the FHM, the browser toolbar, and a repository of available tools (shown in the main pane as a large area).

So any item that can be on your toolbar can go into FHM, including bookmarks. Hence: TOA: toobar overflow area for items you don't use much.

It would be better if they initialized it empty, and if it somehow clearly communicated "Hey, I am a toolbar overflow area: put stuff here that would go on the toolbar that you don't need so much, when you don't have space on the toolbar."

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#135

Post by k_sze »

I cannot agree with the car analogy.

There are two reasons why the signs on the highway are so prominent:

1. When you are driving a car, you are basically meat bags inside 1.5+ ton collapsible metal cages moving around at 30+ or even 100+ km/h. One wrong move and meat bags risk being injured or killed. That's why the signs need to be simple and prominent.

2. A highway network has one and only one purpose: to transport people and things around, so the number of things that you can do on a highway network is inherently rather limited, which is why you can make decisions fast: go faster, go slower, stop, yield, merge, change lanes, exit a ramp, enter a ramp, turn left, turn right. That's why the signs can be simple and prominent.

Neither condition applies to websites in general:

1. If you lose your way on a website, you generally won't injure or kill anybody.

2. Websites generally don't have one and only one purpose, the number of things that you can do on a website cannot be expected to be limited. You could argue that the website menu should have one and only one purpose - to bring visitors to various pages - but that's not always true either.

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#138

Post by JustSomeNobody »

jamesarcher wrote: post #51
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"?

It's in the queue. :) The Crowd Favorite site is in the process of being redesigned, and there'll be changes to the Forty site coming shortly after that. (These changes aren't just because of the hamburger menu, obviously. Digital stuff moves pretty fast in general, and companies keep evolving.)

Ah, so this was a preemptive, "We don't use the hamburger 'cause it is not cool anymore", blog post. ;)

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#139

Post by function_seven »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #131
function_seven wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, me too. And its amusingly frustrating to watch. And we know why double-clicking is a thing, and why it's not consistent across widgets, but I wonder if we'd be better off if the mouse originated not with "left" and "right" buttons, but instead "do" and "select" buttons. The Do button would open the files and visit the hyperlinks, the Select button would add the object you're looking at to a stack of selections,…

Shouldn't you also have a third button to list available actions, or would you throw that away? Overloading the select button would be just as confusing; I hope you don't want to do that.

Ok, ok. How about these buttons?

    [Select]  [DO!]  [Context]
You're right of course. At some point a trade off has to be made among usability, discover-ability, and simplicity. (Pick any two).

Adding another button reduces simplicity, but enhances the other two. Apple's one-button mouse—at the other extreme—makes things simple and discoverable, but often not as useable as I'd like. I still don't know how OSX's equivalent to Windows' [Alt] key access to menu items (does it exist?)

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#140

Post by jamesarcher »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #138
jamesarcher wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's in the queue. :) The Crowd Favorite site is in the process of being redesigned, and there'll be changes to the Forty site coming shortly after that. (These changes aren't just because of the hamburger menu, obviously. Digital stuff moves pretty fast in general, and companies keep evolving.)

Ah, so this was a preemptive, "We don't use the hamburger 'cause it is not cool anymore", blog post. ;)

Actually, more like a "We don't use the hamburger because there's now ample statistical evidence that it doesn't work" blog post. :)
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