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Using hamburger menus? Try sausage links (2019)

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Re: Using hamburger menus? Try sausage links (2019)

#23
These are not the sausage links I thought they would be.

The sausage links I remember were older than internet on mobile being a thing, they were laid out vertically, and they were proportional in size to the target sections such that clicking a link or clicking the scrollbar right at their side would essentially scroll you to the same place on the page.

They were, in my opinion, a much better paradigm than this.

Alas I cannot easily find the demo page again. It might have been lost to history.

Re: Using hamburger menus? Try sausage links (2019)

#25
post #18

No no no. Hamburger menus are terrible[0] for navigation, and this is worse. The only user-centric "Pro" listed by the author, namely that users understand its functionality, is totally unsubstantiated, and I think, exactly the opposite of what is true. These kinds of menus are fine as "filtering inspiration", shortcuts for commonly chosen filters on a dataset, but they are not at all OK as general navigation. They h…

So you’re saying that either is mystery meat navigation?

Re: Using hamburger menus? Try sausage links (2019)

#26
post #18

No no no. Hamburger menus are terrible[0] for navigation, and this is worse. The only user-centric "Pro" listed by the author, namely that users understand its functionality, is totally unsubstantiated, and I think, exactly the opposite of what is true. These kinds of menus are fine as "filtering inspiration", shortcuts for commonly chosen filters on a dataset, but they are not at all OK as general navigation. They h…

Horizontal scrolling isn't that bad on mobile devices. I wouldn't want to scroll one of these on desktop but it's so simple to just, flick through it with my finger on a phone.

Just put it behind a media query when your desktop-sized nav bar gets too big?

Re: Using hamburger menus? Try sausage links (2019)

#27
post #18

No no no. Hamburger menus are terrible[0] for navigation, and this is worse. The only user-centric "Pro" listed by the author, namely that users understand its functionality, is totally unsubstantiated, and I think, exactly the opposite of what is true. These kinds of menus are fine as "filtering inspiration", shortcuts for commonly chosen filters on a dataset, but they are not at all OK as general navigation. They h…

So you’re saying that either is mystery meat navigation?

See also: https://twitter.com/LukeW/status/591296890030915585/photo/1

Re: Using hamburger menus? Try sausage links (2019)

#28
post #17

The bulk of my browsing is done with JS turned off, and I'm astonished how many sites rely on a JS-powered hamburger menu, so I have to enable JS on specific sites just to use their menu! There are pure CSS ways to do hamburger menus, and I encourage all devs to use pure CSS for a hamburger menu for those visitors who browse with JS disabled by default! For those curious: I have JS turned off because of privacy reaso…

Wait, but then web developers would need to actually learn their standard tools like HTML and CSS and how to achieve the goal with a minimalist approach. They might need to invest an hour or two, instead of downloading an NPM package and slapping everything with a meg of JS.

Not sure how realistic this is. When I look at most websites these days, I can see clear signs of bad engineering (and lack of ethics) everywhere.

I am totally on board with the idea to use CSS for things, where we do not need JS. But then again I am not a "modern style" web developer.

In my opinion knowing one or two hip and trendy web frameworks (I will intentionally not say their names now.) doesn't make anyone a good web developer. Real basics are lacking these days. When you only have a hammer, everything starts looking like the head of a nail. Websites with zero requirement of dynamic pages are rendered in JS frameworks, even taking longer than static server side rendering of some template, which could have been used, given the character of the websites. All done under the guise of "This is how websites are developed these days." No, not all websites need to be a SPA.

Anyone, who learned a framework can call themselves web developer these days. I am sure there are good web developers out there, who know their stuff and the basics as well. Even good ones working on the websites I criticize, but they may be forced to use inappropriate tooling by their environment. One does not simply come into an existing project and decide oneself to change a whole stack. Basically many projects are already locked into their inappropriate use of tools.

Re: Using hamburger menus? Try sausage links (2019)

#29
post #18

No no no. Hamburger menus are terrible[0] for navigation, and this is worse. The only user-centric "Pro" listed by the author, namely that users understand its functionality, is totally unsubstantiated, and I think, exactly the opposite of what is true. These kinds of menus are fine as "filtering inspiration", shortcuts for commonly chosen filters on a dataset, but they are not at all OK as general navigation. They h…

Horizontal scrolling isn't that bad on mobile devices. I wouldn't want to scroll one of these on desktop but it's so simple to just, flick through it with my finger on a phone. Just put it behind a media query when your desktop-sized nav bar gets too big?

I suspect the writer of this blog post wrote it on a machine with a track pad or a magic mouse.

Re: Using hamburger menus? Try sausage links (2019)

#30
post #10
post #5

When designing medium to large sized menu navigations on the mobile web the default go-to, for some time now, has been hamburger menus. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing Tell it to the many people who have no idea what it means on a mobile device, or increasingly on desktop websites. I've said it many times before, but it's worth repeating: Most people are frustrated by modern information tools. According to a 2015…

Well, human beings have grown quite accustomed to using symbols to represent actions they need to take. In the United States, I remember learning about Mr. Yuck stickers by the time I was 4, or the shape and color of a stop sign, green means go, walk and don’t walk figures, even an exit sign always looked the same even if I couldn’t read. The hamburger menu takes someone explaining it to you just one time to know wha…

Mr. Yuck is green, Mr. Yuck is mean, Mr. Yuck also has the shape of a face absolutely filled with disgust at having put something terrible in his mouth. In short, Mr. Yuck communicates something purely by expression rather than association.

The hamburger menu looks like decoration, or a portion of the I Ching. Nothing about three horizontal lines says "I contain options for navigation."

Now, were six lines used, with every other line being indented, and then a \ or a / here and there, it would look like something folded up, and I would think, "Oh, unfold this thing." But three horizontal lines just ... no, I got nothin'.

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