61–70 of 208 posts
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…
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…
https://sourcegraph.com/search
https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+errorf&patte...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firefox and Chrome have proven Apple right, in forcing a top-of-screen menu bar to appear whether the application wants it to or not. This was demonstrated to me recently when my parents couldn't figure out how to print on Windows in Firefox (because there's no standard menu on it—they know "file -> print" just fine) and called me for help. After a moment of confusion on my part as I remembered that FF doesn't have a…
I suspect many people reading this HN thread also serve as their family's tech support team. Every week I get calls or emails from my parents requesting help figuring out something that's not obvious from the UI, is accidentally triggered by users, deliberately activated (by the app) during a software update, or buried deep in some settings or submenu. This week's selection includes: - Turning off yet again the annoy…
Hell, I don't like that stuff either (does anyone?) but it's just a minor annoyance for me. For them it can mean they give up trying to do whatever they wanted to do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firefox and Chrome have proven Apple right, in forcing a top-of-screen menu bar to appear whether the application wants it to or not. This was demonstrated to me recently when my parents couldn't figure out how to print on Windows in Firefox (because there's no standard menu on it—they know "file -> print" just fine) and called me for help. After a moment of confusion on my part as I remembered that FF doesn't have a…
That’s anecdotal, but my mother who "grew up" on DOS and Windows was never able to grasp the relationship between the top menu bar and the application window on MacOS. I bought her a Mac in 2010 because they are supposedly more intuitive and I didn’t want to provide PC support anymore, but it was no better than Windows for her at all (also not worse overall I guess).
Clear menus that aren't hidden away are great, but a significant problem with horizontal 'sausage' menus is that it isn't obvious that you can scroll, especially on Apple devices that hide scrollbars. The article mentions this as a bit of an after-thought ("Without proper fade / cut off visual cues, users may not understand they can scroll") but it's the key reason why you should avoid them. To demonstrate, I've fork…
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…
100%. I'm kinda surprised how the 3 lines hamburger menu got so prevalent in the first place, because it always user tests poorly. My guess is that when flat minimalism (my favorite shitty example of this is when Android expected everyone to know what a flat square, circle and triangle are supposed to mean) was the rage, even though user testing always showed a ton of people didn't know what the three lines meant, that designers felt it would eventually become "the standard" and people would know.
Problem is, years later, tons of people still don't know what it means - every time we do user testing, words do better. I think these days design fads change so frequently that there really isn't enough time for any design to be that "standard" long enough for everyone to really grasp it.
Horizontal scrolling should be avoided in almost all cases.
On PCs, at least. On mobile, it's very natural.
This is certainly true of Safari, the default web browser for iOS, to the point where even trying to cycle through a horizontal slideshow of images can bait the user into accidentally going back to the previous page.
Not only that, but on iOS I believe it was/is possible to cycle between open apps with a very similar gesture as going back/forth in browser history -- this already proved pretty dumb for browser usability and would prove worse still for horizontal scrolling elements on websites.
Personally, I like to operate my mobile device one-handed a lot of the time, and at the very least I'm not scrolling websites or switching back/forward with both hands even if I'm holding the device with both hands.
So the last thing I want to do, especially if I'm carrying something in one hand, is to have to try and stretch my thumb to the far side of the phone to scroll through a horizontal menu.
My other argument against this sausage menu idea, which has been around far longer than the date of the linked article, is that on many viewport sizes your links may not be half-occluded by the edge of the screen. Given that mobile browsers tend to hide their scrollbars, since without a cursor the scrollbar is just a progress indicator w.r.t. how far down the page you are.
Thus, on some screen sizes -- and it isn't difficult to encounter, given how many different devices there are out there -- n links will be visible in full before the edge of the screen, and then there may not necessarily be any visual hint that there are more menu items to scroll to. So you don't discover that there are more menu items until you accidentally scroll that region.
Finally, I would argue that even for the technophile the hamburger menu is preferable at this point, simply because they have been conditioned by a good decade's worth of responsive web design UX. The sausage menu, being often an edge case, is less obvious even to the technophile purely because not many sites elected to do it that way.
* * *
It seems to me that the superior alternative to both hamburger and sausage menus would be to adopt the hamburger menu style, but simply replace ≡ or the menu icon with the word "Menu"
The hamburger style can be done without JS too. If you really want to avoid JS, just use :target selector or other CSS shenanigans.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firefox and Chrome have proven Apple right, in forcing a top-of-screen menu bar to appear whether the application wants it to or not. This was demonstrated to me recently when my parents couldn't figure out how to print on Windows in Firefox (because there's no standard menu on it—they know "file -> print" just fine) and called me for help. After a moment of confusion on my part as I remembered that FF doesn't have a…
That’s anecdotal, but my mother who "grew up" on DOS and Windows was never able to grasp the relationship between the top menu bar and the application window on MacOS. I bought her a Mac in 2010 because they are supposedly more intuitive and I didn’t want to provide PC support anymore, but it was no better than Windows for her at all (also not worse overall I guess).
She's switched 80% of her use to an iPad and the rest to a Mac laptop, and I get a question about once a year.
YMMV.