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

161–170 of 192 posts

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#161

Post by prewett »

ggchappell wrote: post #85

Dare I suggest that the "gear" menu, so ubiquitous on Google pages these days, suffers much the same problems as the "hamburger"?

Except that at least a gear looks like an icon, which suggests it might be clickable (since the flat-design people thought that making buttons look like buttons was a bad idea). My problem with the hamburger menu is that I literally don't see it, because three horizontal lines does not look like an icon to me, it looks like a decoration. In pretty much every place I've needed to use it I end up going "hmm, where is [essential feature I can't find]?" Nowhere? Not possible! Oh, yeah, those three lines, that's actually a menu. Yep, there it is.

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#162

Post by abalone »

stirlo wrote: post #148
abalone wrote: post #86

It's very interesting that Apple just adopted a hamburger menu for their apple.com redesign (mobile version). They even told everyone not to use hamburger menus at last year's WWDC! [1] [1] WWDC 2014 Session 211 Designing Intuitive User Experiences @ 32:00, available here: https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/ Addendum: It's a responsive design so you can see this even on a desktop browser just by shrinking t…

The difference is that Apple still has links at the bottom of the page for when the reader gets there. In fact the first link is "Shop & Learn" which expands out to be the same product listing as the Hamburger menu up the top.

So hamburger menus are ok as long as they're duplicated elsewhere? That would be kind of an odd rationale. Why have the hamburger in the first place?

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#163

Post by x0054 »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #56
dperfect wrote: post #36

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.…

> I personally don't find anything wrong with a hamburger menu per se. The trouble, which the article describes with some case studies on engagement before and after hamburger menu implementations, is that people who are not you are confused by it and don't understand it to be a menu. fwiw, I've encountered this quite a bit when helping users switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox or Chrome -- both of which use the…

> ed: for a more specific example, look at Firefox or Chrome, try really hard to imagine that you are a first time user of that web browser, but you've used IE before, and then figure out how to do one of the most common things that people want to do with a web browser: bookmark a page.

You press Command+D, dauh. You know D for Bookmark :)

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#164

Post by x0054 »

dperfect wrote: post #92
sandofsky wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you are an atypical user. You also don't work for Facebook, so you don't have insight into all their priorities. Facebook is a data-driven company. They've publicly discussed the process that resulted in the current tab bar design. In initial tests, they saw a drop in newsfeed views; they solved it by badging the newsfeed tab when new content arrives. Requests get their own tab because adding friends to your net…

No argument here about Facebook's priorities or being data-driven. I don't doubt any of what you're saying. Still, as a user I don't care if data suggests that it's in Facebook's best interest to require a separate app for messages (and keeping around a tab that does absolutely nothing in the current app). I'm sure that is better for their business, at least in the short run. But from a user experience design perspec…

It's beyond me why they made the choice to move out Messages to a different app. Not only is it incredibly frustrating when I accidentally click the messages tab bar, and the entire FB app closes and another app opens, with no easy way to quickly go back (on iOS), but it also eliminated one of the very few reasons I ever needed to open FB app in the first place, to chat with people. Before, when I would open the FB app to chat with people, I would inevitably quickly look through the feed, and be exposed to one or two of their crappy ads. Now I can just open the FB Chat client and never bother with the main app. A win for me, perhaps. But a win for FB?

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#165

Post by e12e »

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,…

> I wonder if we'd be better off if the mouse originated not with "left" and "right" buttons, but instead "do" and "select" buttons.

Are you being ironic? I can't tell :-)

"Red button

The left button on a three button mouse: Used to select information (...)": http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1904

"Yellow button

Middle button (usually) on a three button mouse: Activate a menu to invoke an action concerting the contents of a window; e.g. carrying out an editing operation on text withing the window. (...)"

http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1905

"Blue button

Right button on a three button mouse: Activate the menu or invoke an action concering the manipulation of the window (view / Morph) itself; e.g. moving or closing a window.

The blue button is for meta actions. (...)"

http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1906

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#166

Post by e12e »

function_seven wrote: post #139
Dylan16807 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 equivalen…

I do think using three buttons are good -- I'm not so happy with the classic "Xerox Parc/Smalltalk" layout -- I'd prefer to have a button on the thumb (like many logitech mice have) and a scroll-wheel in the middle that's not a button.

Which leaves us with a bit of a problem for touch screens. While it might be ok to demand users to learn one and two-finger touch -- three finger touch might be going a bit too far...

[ed: And for those that want to remap buttons, but avoid the bloated logitech software, in windows I recommend: http://www.highrez.co.uk/downloads/XMouseButtonControl.htm

In X it's of course much easier (or more difficult, depending on your point of view): https://wiki.debian.org/Keyboard/MultimediaKeys ]

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#167

Post by asgard1024 »

I hate the Nondescript Icon Movement. The Hamburger should die together with Three Dots, Angle Brackets and other geometric shapes that have a chutzpah to call themselves icons. Not to mention they killed the Tooltips!

These things don't appear in the vacuum - the Hamburger Menu originated from the Celtic Knot Menu, which was originally at the end of the Ribbon. The Ribbon itself confused the use cases of the Menu and the Toolbar, and was rightly criticized for that.

I am just learning Emacs and it's a little paradox that this aspie guy Richard Stallman is the one who got so many things around the UI right. We are unfortunately confusing "easy to learn" with "dumbed down so much there is nothing to learn".

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#168

Post by digi_owl »

bane wrote: post #141
abalone wrote: post #86

It's very interesting that Apple just adopted a hamburger menu for their apple.com redesign (mobile version). They even told everyone not to use hamburger menus at last year's WWDC! [1] [1] WWDC 2014 Session 211 Designing Intuitive User Experiences @ 32:00, available here: https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/ Addendum: It's a responsive design so you can see this even on a desktop browser just by shrinking t…

Apple is very very good at telling everybody else what not to do, then going and doing it themselves.

Apple, under Jobs in particular, reminded me of the schoolyard "cool kids" that would verbally piss all over something until they themselves could afford it.

Jobs loudly proclaimed that people didn't read, yet within a year Apple was selling ebooks.

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#169

Post by digi_owl »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #56
dperfect wrote: post #36

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.…

> I personally don't find anything wrong with a hamburger menu per se. The trouble, which the article describes with some case studies on engagement before and after hamburger menu implementations, is that people who are not you are confused by it and don't understand it to be a menu. fwiw, I've encountered this quite a bit when helping users switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox or Chrome -- both of which use the…

I find myself attributing this to the constantly hammered home message from Apple and MS about how easy computer use is.

Therefore when something is "not easy" (aka, breaks with people's rote learning), people having trouble will not admit it. As it will in their mind be the equivalent of admitting they are stupid.

Re: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

#170

Post by Joeri »

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.

Oberon used mark, do and select for the three mouse buttons. That and interclicks, which i haven't seen anywhere else.

http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/mouse.html

Post reply on HN