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Using hamburger menus? Try sausage links (2019)

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

#141

Post by seanp2k2 »

at_a_remove wrote: post #30
dpcan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In Chrome right now, it's 3 dots aligned vertically. Not much better really.

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

#142

Post by seanp2k2 »

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).

what we need are literal site maps with (lat, lon) defined for each link, so users can scroll around a fun treasure map to find what they're looking for

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

#144

Post by gary_0 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #67
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…

> 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…

> flat minimalism

"Modern" design is so opposed to any skeuomorphism that every item on the screen has been totally drained of color and detail. So many UIs are frustrating to use because everything is an abstract monochrome glyph. The extreme of fashion over function we're suffering right now is mind-boggling.

In the early 2000's we had books like Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think"; but now, for some reason, decades of design and engineering knowledge are being totally ignored, to society's great detriment.

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

#145

Post by fuzzythinker »

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…

Having a "..." at the end that drops down a menu panel like most hamburger menu do instead of having a horizontal scroller may be the best of both worlds.

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

#146

Post by underwater »

dkonofalski wrote: post #121
politelemon wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite, the usage of lines are still conveying something, it's similar to pause, play, stop on media players, it's similar to back, forward and refresh icons on the browser. Line based symbols are easy to pick up and have been picked up by users from our testing, I'm really not sure what studies you're referring to (?) For an actual shitty example, look at Macos window button controls. Red yellow and green circles…

I think you're either unaware or ignoring that, in both of those cases, there was precedent that people were already familiar with when those icons came out. Pause, play, and stop, for example, were found on nearly any media/cassette/tape player and served as simple indicators of the direction the tape/spool was going. The arrow to left meant the reel was spinning backwards because the tape moved to the left, the squ…

The hamburger menu represents a list of items. It's symbolic, but at least a direct representation of the outcome the user wants.

The play and stop icons were icons that describe an operation of a machine that will then indirectly produce the outcome the user wants. They require the user to know how the machine functions. No one thinks "I would like the tape to move to the right" or "I would like the music to stop, which means the tape needs to stop moving, which means stopping the spools, which means selecting the least circular shape".

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

#147

Post by flutas »

ilamont wrote: post #55
brimble wrote: post #48

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…

> - Turning off yet again the annoying computer voice announcing any navigation or volume change on my parents' new Samsung TV (accessibility option, not sure why it turned on, but it required me visiting their home in person again to turn it off)

For this one, I don't think it's a software update but rather user error (though it's not clear even to me how).

I myself have accidentally enabled it, there seems to be some combination of buttons on the remote that will enable it. Still not sure on the specific combo though.

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

#148

Post by lrdd »

wanda wrote: post #69
CharlesW wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Mobile browsers frequently come with gestures that can effectively override any attempts to scroll horizontally, instead taking the user backwards/forwards in browsing history, for example. 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…

See https://jenne.uk as an example

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

#149

Post by kitsunesoba »

jayd16 wrote: post #96
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…

Designers like the hamburger because it lets them sweep anything they haven't considered under the rug. They're simple so no one attempts to cram in carousels or videos or what have you, so its the easiest way to add functionality into an app that doesn't have any other thought put into expanding the navigation. So in that sense they're highly productive.

This is one of the things I dislike most about hamburger menus: they're effectively junk drawers than can contain anything and everything and are painful to try to search through.

Just about every prior type of navigation is better.

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

#150

Post by layer8 »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #140
layer8 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The first time I discovered that "dragging an icon to the trash" was one of the few ways to uninstall an application on Mac, my mind was a bit blown. I was struggling so hard to find an "Add/remove programs" equivalent or an uninstaller.

I believe it’s because that literally just deletes the application file/directory, there’s no hook for application-specific uninstall routines.
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