Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Using hamburger menus? Try sausage links (2019)

tdarb.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 208 posts

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

#111

Post by dec0dedab0de »

felix318 wrote: post #106
brimble wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent years thinking they [EDIT: Apple's always-top-of-screen application menus, that is] were dumb for that reason. It never occurred to me that major software vendors would be stupid and/or user-hating enough to ditch the standard top menu, when they have a whole bunch of stuff that should go in it.

I seem to recall Steve Jobs saying the reason the menu is at the top of the screen is that it's easier to hit it with the mouse, you just push it all the way up. I think it's a valid point.

I have had my second monitor on top of my main one for the last 20 years, when I switched to a Mac this was the hardest thing to get used to.

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

#112

Post by benatkin »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #14

Sometime back UberEats switched from a hamburger to a sausage menu for the restaurant’s menu categories and I really feel the experience is worse overall for it. While I suppose it’s now more obvious that the categories are there, it’s way less usable trying to scroll left and right to see them compared to before where you scrolled up and down the old vertical hamburger menu. On a related note, it’s incredible to me…

The scrollable sausage links make it harder to skim them, and make you instead read them. I think they might be doing that to get you to see more of the menu and perhaps order more, which makes them more money.

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

#113

Post by coastflow »

bentcorner wrote: post #54
css wrote: post #15

Horizontal scrolling should be avoided in almost all cases.

I'm curious about why horizontal scrolling feels so bad. Like it works just fine in mapping apps, which naturally align to a 2d canvas, but why does it feel so lousy to use with almost any other form of information? Is it because we write left-to-right, top-to-bottom? So text chunks fit better with no horizontal scrolling? (I think this is also why vertical tabs are so much better than horizontal tabs).

Intuitively, it might be because the mouse predates the touchpad, and most mice only have vertical scroll wheels (so it conditions users to avoid discovering horizontal scrolling as an option, unless you click and drag a horizontal scroll bar).

Currently, it's also rare for webpages to feature horizontal scrolling, so by habit most users scroll vertically to access new information.

Discovery is also another reason mentioned by users elsewhere in these comments. Since horizontal scrolling is a rare behaviour, a clear signifier [0] is needed to quickly communicate that horizontal scrolling is a possibility, which is an extra problem that other potential methods don't have.

[0] https://sites.google.com/site/thedesignofeverydaythings/home...

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

#114

Post by unethical_ban »

brimble wrote: post #107
rustyminnow wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is besides your point, but in Firefox there is an option to turn the menu bar back on (at least until they remove the option :/). If you go to the "Customize Toolbar" page, on the bottom left where it says "Toolbars v" you can check "[ ] Menu Bar". Hope that helps (a little)!

It'd occurred to me there was probably a setting to fix it, but I've forgotten to check the last couple times I've been over, because I'm a bad son :-( Thanks for confirming my suspicion, will try to remember to change that setting for them next time.

You can also tap "alt" to make it appear, I believe, if it isn't enabled.

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

#115

Post by TuringTest »

Izkata wrote: post #103
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like the sausage link concept because it clearly labels options with text. 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 t…

The original symbol represented a menu that pops up from the bottom of the screen, as they worked in the early Android versions: https://www.cnet.com/a/img/resize/06c3657d29dbfaf9cc921d2690... The three-lines version was an evolution of that, just chopping off the sides to go extra minimal, and happened very quickly. And nowadays we have an even more minimal one, shortening the three lines to three dots.

At least the three dots look like the ellipsis, which has a standard meaning of "there's even more..."

At the end of a list of other menu entries, there's a chance that it can be inferred to mean "let's me see some more".

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

#116

Post by benatkin »

kingnothing wrote: post #72
jonathanlydall wrote: post #14

Sometime back UberEats switched from a hamburger to a sausage menu for the restaurant’s menu categories and I really feel the experience is worse overall for it. While I suppose it’s now more obvious that the categories are there, it’s way less usable trying to scroll left and right to see them compared to before where you scrolled up and down the old vertical hamburger menu. On a related note, it’s incredible to me…

Uber A/B tests everything extensively before it gets rolled out to everyone. They would not have switched away from the hamburger menu unless it drove better metrics. I used to work there.

If it's an intentional dark pattern, they may take A/B testing into consideration, but still decide to make usability tradeoffs.

https://www.darkpatterns.org/

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

#117

Post by kozd »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #90
the_pwner224 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my favorite shitty example of this is when Android expected everyone to know what a flat square, circle and triangle are supposed to mean What is this referring to? Edit: I'm so used to these buttons that I didn't even realize they were just simple flat shapes. It definitely would be confusing for someone new to Android or for someone who's not good with tech.

In Android[0], the "back" button on the bottom is a triangle pointing left. The "home" button is a circle. The "show recent apps" button is a square. All are just flat shapes. Completely unintuitive to anybody that's never used Android before. Contrast that to the early days of Android where the Back button was a curved arrow, the Home button was an icon of a house, and the Menu button was the hamburger menu people a…

Back symbol pointing left is probably less intuitive if your language isn't left to right oriented. Wonder if back symbols or back animations have ever been "localized" to orient based on the language used.

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

#118

Post by TuringTest »

satyrnein wrote: post #53
ftio wrote: 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…

If you have a huge number of top-level items, deeply consider your information architecture before downgrading to a hamburger menu. Ir seems like you can hide all the items (hamburger menu), hide some of the items (sausage links or overflow menu), or have a deep hierarchical navigation. While breadcrumbs were fairly established on desktop, mobile apps typically only have a single-level back/up button. It's easy to lo…

Accordions, lists where selecting one item scrolls the view one screen to the right to show a sublist... there are many common idioms for nested structures.

But the best strategy is always to simplify the number of different nodes to flatten navigation as much as possible.

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

#119

Post by davidspiess »

onion2k wrote: post #20

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…

Airbnb comes to mind, they added left and right arrows to their tabs. https://imgur.com/a/MXDabnS

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

#120

Post by abortionlover69 »

ilamont wrote: 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…

No post body was provided.
Post reply on HN