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The hamburger menu is a pet peeve of mine! It takes much less cognitive load to simply read the word “menu”. Also, it used to be important when screens were no

The hamburger menu is a pet peeve of mine! It takes much less cognitive load to simply read the word “menu”. Also, it used to be important when screens were nowhere near as wide but now there’s no longer any reason to use it the way it is. Perhaps it is permissible on a busy UI with many buttons, but that job was taken by the ellipses, which also takes less cognitive burden!

bilekas 1y ago
I'm curious, not a UI designer at all here, but what's so taxing about the hamburger? I grew up with it mostly always around and never even thought twice about it..
- bandoti 1y ago
  Any symbolic visual takes time for our brains to decode. When compared to language which we’ve spent our entire lives decoding and which comes much naturally, the cognitive burden is much higher. In addition the three bars are as mundane of a composition as you can get, so it doesn’t capture the eye well to begin with. Typically the eye gets pulled to more visually complexity. But ultimately it boils down to the decoding idea—language is the ultimate “codec” of human communication.
  - baseballdork 1y ago
    Isn't text a "symbolic visual"? I would think that at some point a symbol that's used as frequently as the hamburger icon would/could eventually become equivalent to the word.
    - zdragnar 1y ago
      > Typically the eye gets pulled to more visually complexity. Written words have a "voice" - that part of your mind that recognizes something spoken. Hamburger menu icons don't have that, nor do they have the higher contrast or complexity that emoji have.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  The implication of "load" is not that it's a huge hurdle, but just that it takes longer (even a tiny bit) for most users to visually assess what it means. Add up all those little delays, and you have a frustrated new user. I regularly use a piece of software from IBM that has (this won't surprise you) an awful UI. There are not one but TWO hamburger menus, hidden amongst a bunch of text menu headings, and figuring out where the one you want is can be noticeably taxing. Explaining to another user where to click is even worse - "No, not that one, the one under the... to the right..."
  - Izkata 1y ago
    > but just that it takes longer (even a tiny bit) for most users to visually assess what it means Also as an example, three horizontal lines also sometimes get used as grips to indicate an element can be click-dragged around. It is less common than it used to be, though.
- JohnFen 1y ago
  My problem with it mostly that it hides functionality. Seeing a hamburger menu gives you no insight as to what options exist under it. The menu itself also tends to be a "grab bag" of multiple otherwise unconnected things, increasing the effort required to figure out how to do something.
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    I like to refer to them as junk drawers due to their messy nature. Apps with hamburger menus also tend to have navigation that’s otherwise not well though out, think burying options in chains of modals where the paths to those options change whenever the app’s dev decides it wants to push a different feature/metric.
    - ryandrake 1y ago
      I like the "junk drawer" analogy. It's perfect. IMO if you as an app developer find yourself reaching for a hamburger menu, that's the time to step back and stop adding junk features, especially if you're writing a mobile app or web page. If you can't fit your application's critical functionality in, say, 4 tabs across the bottom of the app, the app is probably trying to do too much.
      - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
        That’s often the case, but the other common problem is lack of consideration about hierarchy. It’s fine if every function of the app isn’t accessible with a single tap — that’s probably not necessary except for the app’s most pivotal functions, but most things should be able to be used within two taps and almost everything within three, with the paths being logical and predictable. It’s plenty doable, but like I said it takes some sitting down and planning and perhaps more importantly, design centered around the user and their needs and less around looking pretty in a slideshow or trying herd the user around.
- KaiMagnus 1y ago
  I know it's only anecdotal, but my mom doesn't get it. She's not super interested in her iPad and basically only uses it when she has to or for FaceTime. She'd be the perfect test subject for stress testing UIs and more interfaces than you'd think are doing a pretty poor job of explaining themselves. Not many icons are intuitive, hiding something in modal windows, muscle memory/dexterity and precision are all problem areas. The hamburger is basically all of that rolled into one button. It's pretty abstract, you never know what's behind it and when they get fancy with animations and swipe gestures, it's almost always a failure. I know it's a convenient way to clean up a screen, but the content in that menu needs to be absolutely optional for it to work.
- myself248 1y ago
  Because when I eat a hamburger, there isn't a whole restaurant inside it. Nothing about the food suggests its function. And the function varies, it might be a whole rabbit-warren of menus and options. It might be a bunch of actions. It might just be one last item that wouldn't fit on the screen. It's an awful graphic for an awful concept. "We ran out of UI ideas so we just shoveled what was left into this junk drawer" is no way to go through life.
- godshatter 1y ago
  As someone that has been learning new interfaces for the past 50-ish years as they randomly appear and mutate... I had no real idea what the icon might mean. Something that is stacked up that might drop down if I touch it? Could the lines mean a text document of some kind? Could it be a list of things? I got there eventually, but the word "menu" wouldn't have required any guessing on my part, for example. It was easier, though, than figuring out that the three vertical lines at the bottom of my android phone meant switch apps or that the rounded square meant "make the app go away, but don't kill it".
JohnFen 1y ago
I couldn't agree more. The hamburger menu is in my list of the worst UI elements around. It has nothing good to recommend it. It's barely tolerable in situations where screen space is at a premium, but it's still pretty awful. > Its growing ubiquity helped standardize its meaning: Through repeated exposure, users learned to recognize and interpret the icon with increasing confidence. Sure: it's the symbol of the "junk drawer" of the UI. Who knows what random assortment lurks in there? It's a place you go only as a last resort.
msgodel 1y ago
Even the palm pilot with its ridiculously tiny screen and bad touch ditigizer managed CUA-style menus. Mobile UI design isn't about making things more understandable, it's about getting the user into a helpless and suggestible state so your ad impressions are worth more.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  More than anything hamburger menu type design feels to me like an “avoid effort and skill as much as possible” sort of thing more than it does an “optimize ad revenue” sort of thing, as does flat design. It’s about lowering the bar for what’s acceptable to ship as far as you can possibly get away with. Plaster some scrolling flat rounded rectangles and a hamburger menu on the screen and boom you’ve got an app.
  - Y_Y 1y ago
    Don't make me think? Don't let me think!
- xnx 1y ago
  I had to look up "CUA". Common User Access (CUA) is a standard for user interfaces developed by IBM to provide consistency across operating systems and computer programs.
- kalleboo 1y ago
  The Palm menubar wasn't permanently visible, the Palm had as close as you can get to a hamburger menu to reveal it https://kalleboo.com/linked/palm-burger.jpg https://kalleboo.com/linked/palm-burger.jpg
inanutshellus 1y ago
I think it's time to let this pet peeve go. :( It wouldn't be fair to use "MENU", as not everyone speaks English, and regardless, many UIs aesthetically need an icon, so why not have standardized on one? It's healthy to have decided on an icon, but I agree an ellipsis would've been (and still would be) intuitive too. Maybe designers trying to make their mark will start using ellipses in new designs... who knows.
- JohnFen 1y ago
  Replacing the hamburger icon with the word "Menu" wouldn't make anything better. The problem isn't the icon, it's the disorganization.
  - inanutshellus 1y ago
    If the designer wants to encourage super-users and quicker access then splaying out all options is better. If they want "clean and tidy", the icon is better. Heck, even when I have splayed out all the most-important options across the screen... where do I put the /rest/ of the menu options? in an "other" menu, likely drawn with 3 horizontal lines.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - andrekandre 1y ago
    > it's the disorganization its true in many cases, those hold-everything menus end up has junk drawers that users have hard time navigating through, especially on mobile screens where not everything is shown at once AND the scroll indicator is by default hidden so its not obvious there are more items below the screen edge
- sceptic123 1y ago
  You're assuming that it's an agreed and understood standard, which it really isn't. Tech savvy audiences often don't find it easy to understand that there are lots of people who don't understand things like this. In terms of using MENU, if your audience is not English speaking then you can, and should, consider adding internationalisation and localisation as an alternative. If you have considered it for your content, it makes sense to consider it for your UI as well.
throwaway843 1y ago
I'm curious what's cognitively loading about three horizontal bars arranged in a square located in the corner of an app or website. Screens, somewhat counterintuitively, used to be wider. Because they were not on handheld mobile devices. Then we had the menubar and nested dropdowns, suckerfish, etc. It was an exciting time to see a menu, you were never quite sure what you were going to get - I believe there are positives to learning curves for power users. But I digress. 三 means 3 in Chinese. It doesn't take cognitive load. Why does a hamburger? I really am curious.
- bandoti 1y ago
  Well, to put it in perspective, consider these three words: Menu Settings Notepad If these are actionable buttons, the message is encoded and decoded by viewers. Three bars means what, exactly? There’s the cognitive load.
  - xnx 1y ago
    > Three bars means what, exactly? There’s the cognitive load. This was true early on when it was not a common convention, or only used in mobile apps. Now, it is nearly universal, though still not nearly standard enough in placement or presentation. If we were to redo history, it would've been great to see an expanding menu closely positioned by a top-left logo. Sort of like a Windows Start Menu for each website.
    - bandoti 1y ago
      I understand and agree to an extent with common use. However, it stands that language is more specific and unambiguous—thus better suited to communicate an action. There’s also the problem of the plethora of OTHER icons which use horizontal bars to cause even more cognitive load. And then, there are many people who have not learned hamburger menu since childhood, and thus the burden is even greater!
  - throwaway843 1y ago
    Three bars means... the exact same thing the thousands and thousands of times it's been seen before. People have no inate understanding of 'menu'. We don't even read short words like that letter by letter, it's read as a block and is far more complex than three bars.
v5v3 1y ago
"Also, it used to be important when screens were nowhere near as wide but now there’s no longer any reason to use it the way it is." Mobile users?
- aidenn0 1y ago
  There is more than enough room for 4 menus across the top of a typical mobile device. If you expect the user to need to access it regularly, you could even put it across the bottom. This is why the homescreen on most phones has 4 items across the bottom; not a single hamburger menu with "Phone, Messages, Web, ..."

bilekas 1y ago

I'm curious, not a UI designer at all here, but what's so taxing about the hamburger? I grew up with it mostly always around and never even thought twice about it..

bandoti 1y ago
Any symbolic visual takes time for our brains to decode. When compared to language which we’ve spent our entire lives decoding and which comes much naturally, the cognitive burden is much higher. In addition the three bars are as mundane of a composition as you can get, so it doesn’t capture the eye well to begin with. Typically the eye gets pulled to more visually complexity. But ultimately it boils down to the decoding idea—language is the ultimate “codec” of human communication.
- baseballdork 1y ago
  Isn't text a "symbolic visual"? I would think that at some point a symbol that's used as frequently as the hamburger icon would/could eventually become equivalent to the word.
  - zdragnar 1y ago
    > Typically the eye gets pulled to more visually complexity. Written words have a "voice" - that part of your mind that recognizes something spoken. Hamburger menu icons don't have that, nor do they have the higher contrast or complexity that emoji have.
IAmBroom 1y ago
The implication of "load" is not that it's a huge hurdle, but just that it takes longer (even a tiny bit) for most users to visually assess what it means. Add up all those little delays, and you have a frustrated new user. I regularly use a piece of software from IBM that has (this won't surprise you) an awful UI. There are not one but TWO hamburger menus, hidden amongst a bunch of text menu headings, and figuring out where the one you want is can be noticeably taxing. Explaining to another user where to click is even worse - "No, not that one, the one under the... to the right..."
- Izkata 1y ago
  > but just that it takes longer (even a tiny bit) for most users to visually assess what it means Also as an example, three horizontal lines also sometimes get used as grips to indicate an element can be click-dragged around. It is less common than it used to be, though.
JohnFen 1y ago
My problem with it mostly that it hides functionality. Seeing a hamburger menu gives you no insight as to what options exist under it. The menu itself also tends to be a "grab bag" of multiple otherwise unconnected things, increasing the effort required to figure out how to do something.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  I like to refer to them as junk drawers due to their messy nature. Apps with hamburger menus also tend to have navigation that’s otherwise not well though out, think burying options in chains of modals where the paths to those options change whenever the app’s dev decides it wants to push a different feature/metric.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    I like the "junk drawer" analogy. It's perfect. IMO if you as an app developer find yourself reaching for a hamburger menu, that's the time to step back and stop adding junk features, especially if you're writing a mobile app or web page. If you can't fit your application's critical functionality in, say, 4 tabs across the bottom of the app, the app is probably trying to do too much.
    - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
      That’s often the case, but the other common problem is lack of consideration about hierarchy. It’s fine if every function of the app isn’t accessible with a single tap — that’s probably not necessary except for the app’s most pivotal functions, but most things should be able to be used within two taps and almost everything within three, with the paths being logical and predictable. It’s plenty doable, but like I said it takes some sitting down and planning and perhaps more importantly, design centered around the user and their needs and less around looking pretty in a slideshow or trying herd the user around.
KaiMagnus 1y ago
I know it's only anecdotal, but my mom doesn't get it. She's not super interested in her iPad and basically only uses it when she has to or for FaceTime. She'd be the perfect test subject for stress testing UIs and more interfaces than you'd think are doing a pretty poor job of explaining themselves. Not many icons are intuitive, hiding something in modal windows, muscle memory/dexterity and precision are all problem areas. The hamburger is basically all of that rolled into one button. It's pretty abstract, you never know what's behind it and when they get fancy with animations and swipe gestures, it's almost always a failure. I know it's a convenient way to clean up a screen, but the content in that menu needs to be absolutely optional for it to work.
myself248 1y ago
Because when I eat a hamburger, there isn't a whole restaurant inside it. Nothing about the food suggests its function. And the function varies, it might be a whole rabbit-warren of menus and options. It might be a bunch of actions. It might just be one last item that wouldn't fit on the screen. It's an awful graphic for an awful concept. "We ran out of UI ideas so we just shoveled what was left into this junk drawer" is no way to go through life.
godshatter 1y ago
As someone that has been learning new interfaces for the past 50-ish years as they randomly appear and mutate... I had no real idea what the icon might mean. Something that is stacked up that might drop down if I touch it? Could the lines mean a text document of some kind? Could it be a list of things? I got there eventually, but the word "menu" wouldn't have required any guessing on my part, for example. It was easier, though, than figuring out that the three vertical lines at the bottom of my android phone meant switch apps or that the rounded square meant "make the app go away, but don't kill it".

JohnFen 1y ago

I couldn't agree more. The hamburger menu is in my list of the worst UI elements around. It has nothing good to recommend it. It's barely tolerable in situations where screen space is at a premium, but it's still pretty awful. > Its growing ubiquity helped standardize its meaning: Through repeated exposure, users learned to recognize and interpret the icon with increasing confidence. Sure: it's the symbol of the "junk drawer" of the UI. Who knows what random assortment lurks in there? It's a place you go only as a last resort.

msgodel 1y ago

Even the palm pilot with its ridiculously tiny screen and bad touch ditigizer managed CUA-style menus. Mobile UI design isn't about making things more understandable, it's about getting the user into a helpless and suggestible state so your ad impressions are worth more.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
More than anything hamburger menu type design feels to me like an “avoid effort and skill as much as possible” sort of thing more than it does an “optimize ad revenue” sort of thing, as does flat design. It’s about lowering the bar for what’s acceptable to ship as far as you can possibly get away with. Plaster some scrolling flat rounded rectangles and a hamburger menu on the screen and boom you’ve got an app.
- Y_Y 1y ago
  Don't make me think? Don't let me think!
xnx 1y ago
I had to look up "CUA". Common User Access (CUA) is a standard for user interfaces developed by IBM to provide consistency across operating systems and computer programs.
kalleboo 1y ago
The Palm menubar wasn't permanently visible, the Palm had as close as you can get to a hamburger menu to reveal it https://kalleboo.com/linked/palm-burger.jpg https://kalleboo.com/linked/palm-burger.jpg

inanutshellus 1y ago

I think it's time to let this pet peeve go. :( It wouldn't be fair to use "MENU", as not everyone speaks English, and regardless, many UIs aesthetically need an icon, so why not have standardized on one? It's healthy to have decided on an icon, but I agree an ellipsis would've been (and still would be) intuitive too. Maybe designers trying to make their mark will start using ellipses in new designs... who knows.

JohnFen 1y ago
Replacing the hamburger icon with the word "Menu" wouldn't make anything better. The problem isn't the icon, it's the disorganization.
- inanutshellus 1y ago
  If the designer wants to encourage super-users and quicker access then splaying out all options is better. If they want "clean and tidy", the icon is better. Heck, even when I have splayed out all the most-important options across the screen... where do I put the /rest/ of the menu options? in an "other" menu, likely drawn with 3 horizontal lines.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- andrekandre 1y ago
  > it's the disorganization its true in many cases, those hold-everything menus end up has junk drawers that users have hard time navigating through, especially on mobile screens where not everything is shown at once AND the scroll indicator is by default hidden so its not obvious there are more items below the screen edge
sceptic123 1y ago
You're assuming that it's an agreed and understood standard, which it really isn't. Tech savvy audiences often don't find it easy to understand that there are lots of people who don't understand things like this. In terms of using MENU, if your audience is not English speaking then you can, and should, consider adding internationalisation and localisation as an alternative. If you have considered it for your content, it makes sense to consider it for your UI as well.

throwaway843 1y ago

I'm curious what's cognitively loading about three horizontal bars arranged in a square located in the corner of an app or website. Screens, somewhat counterintuitively, used to be wider. Because they were not on handheld mobile devices. Then we had the menubar and nested dropdowns, suckerfish, etc. It was an exciting time to see a menu, you were never quite sure what you were going to get - I believe there are positives to learning curves for power users. But I digress. 三 means 3 in Chinese. It doesn't take cognitive load. Why does a hamburger? I really am curious.

bandoti 1y ago
Well, to put it in perspective, consider these three words: Menu Settings Notepad If these are actionable buttons, the message is encoded and decoded by viewers. Three bars means what, exactly? There’s the cognitive load.
- xnx 1y ago
  > Three bars means what, exactly? There’s the cognitive load. This was true early on when it was not a common convention, or only used in mobile apps. Now, it is nearly universal, though still not nearly standard enough in placement or presentation. If we were to redo history, it would've been great to see an expanding menu closely positioned by a top-left logo. Sort of like a Windows Start Menu for each website.
  - bandoti 1y ago
    I understand and agree to an extent with common use. However, it stands that language is more specific and unambiguous—thus better suited to communicate an action. There’s also the problem of the plethora of OTHER icons which use horizontal bars to cause even more cognitive load. And then, there are many people who have not learned hamburger menu since childhood, and thus the burden is even greater!
- throwaway843 1y ago
  Three bars means... the exact same thing the thousands and thousands of times it's been seen before. People have no inate understanding of 'menu'. We don't even read short words like that letter by letter, it's read as a block and is far more complex than three bars.

v5v3 1y ago

"Also, it used to be important when screens were nowhere near as wide but now there’s no longer any reason to use it the way it is." Mobile users?

aidenn0 1y ago
There is more than enough room for 4 menus across the top of a typical mobile device. If you expect the user to need to access it regularly, you could even put it across the bottom. This is why the homescreen on most phones has 4 items across the bottom; not a single hamburger menu with "Phone, Messages, Web, ..."