Live data from Hacker News

Using hamburger menus? Try sausage links (2019)

tdarb.org

31–40 of 208 posts

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

#31
post #15

Horizontal scrolling should be avoided in almost all cases.

On PCs, at least. On mobile, it's very natural.

No, as there is usually no proper indication that you can scroll.

Even if, it's annoying one missclick and you might land somewhere else.

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

#32
I enjoyed thinking about this. A few thoughts on usability!

The text on these sausage links makes the buttons quite visible and readable, but I find these joined buttons to be most helpful when one is always active and the options are mutually exclusive. For example, at the bottom the zoom buttons (1x, 0.5x, 0.25x) do this very well. One is always highlighted so it's very easy to understand the current state and to pick a different state.

I'd argue this works less well in the top-left buttons (HTML, SCSS) because there is a hidden behavior that collapse and expands the sidebar. It's clever, but I didn't expect the bar to open, nor did I expect it to close when I tapped it a second time. It workes pretty well in this website preview example because html/css feels like good use of the side panel, but I'd argue most hamburger buttons hide much more rarely used views like logout, account and privacy settings, payment options, etc, so not sure the sausage links can replace all these, but an interesting thought experiment.

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

#33
Not a fan of hamburger menu but I disagree this is an improvement, the scrollbar wasn't visible on my platform (chrome, mac) and it wasn't clear how to scroll.

I'm not even sure how I would horizontally scroll with a mouse (I seem to remember something about hold middle clicking and dragging).

Why not just have all the links in multiple rows or have a few subcategories + expand and navigate through the list of links?

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

#34
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On PCs, at least. On mobile, it's very natural.

I do not agree. Content should fit the viewport.

This. I still don't understand why editors all have horizontal wrapping disabled by default.

Every time I scroll horizontally I die a little.

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

#36
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…

Icons don’t work with on page search (e.g CTRL+F).

And it’s hard to describe icons to someone else on the phone. I‘m not sure if Word is still the mess it used to be, but this kind of interface design can be really hard to understand and learn. Currently for me this is Blender. The software is complex, the interface mirrors this, but if you’re new to it, this is really hard to learn.

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

#37
I noticed this recently on the React docs site on mobile [0]. It's also used on Github mobile's view of repository for switching between Code, Issues, Pull Requests, etc [1].

[0] https://reactjs.org/docs/getting-started.html

[1] https://github.com/multiprocessio/datastation

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

#38
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?

It can be OK in some cases, but it can be hard to discover unless it's very obvious. Thanks to Apple hiding scroll bars, if the elements in a horizontal scroll happen to line up with the edge of the screen it can be impossible to tell that horizontal scrolling is even an option unless you trigger it accidentally.

Edit: Oh yeah, and horizontal scrolling interacts unpredicatably with horizontal gestures on mobile. E.g. forward/back in iOS Safari.

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

#39
Isn't that just reinventing tabs or tab-like top menus that have been around for decades? Works nice enough when you only have a few items to deal with, but really doesn't scale to a larger number of items. Horizontal scrolling might work better on mobile than on desktop, but it's still not great due to the items being so much wider than they are high.
Post reply on HN