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Comment by colept | Hacker News Reader

I get the point trying to be made here, but the whole premise of "learning" has quite an oversight on the tangible differences between a hamburger menu and a pause button.

A VCR pause button is always in the same place - next to the play button. We don't know a pause button because of it's shape or color, but rather it's context. You know where to find it because the controls for our music and video devices are familiar. If you take a pause button and put it in any other context, it loses it's meaning.

The hamburger menu doesn't have context. It's different from one site to another - from shape to placement. The icon has no grouping - no play button. It doesn't work there's no icon that can visually capture and condense the imagery of a menu without context.

What ever happened to just "Menu" with a caret?

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The hamburger menu doesn't have context...

This, yes. The 'pause' button has a single, unambiguous meaning: 'pause the current action.' The hamburger menu means 'display in some fashion an unknown number of things of an indeterminate nature.' The hamburger menu is evidence of a lack of design rigor, the kitchen junk drawer of user experience design. It's sometimes necessary, but never ideal.

The hamburger menus mean "show me more actions I can perform." Pretty simple if you ask me.

It's also the same icon as "drag to reorder" from web 2.0

Look at any music app, and you'll see that the pause icon does in fact have meaning absent of a neighboring play button: music apps hide the play button when music is already playing, and it's still clear how to pause. Many video players on the web show pause controls even in the absence of next/prev buttons, let alone a play button.

The context required to parse || as "pause" is just being in a context where pausing is possible. But we've accepted even less context-specific iconography for controls and navigation than even the pause icon; for example, why does × mean "close" when it's in the upper-right corner of a screen? It's fairly arbitrary, but — well, it means close, and it's not confusing. I think the hamburger icon in the upper-left corner of the screen is starting to (or already does) assume the same ubiquity: "main menu."

Play/Pause as an on/off toggle is still contextual within the music app. The play button is always going to be in the same place, and the pause button not much farther away. Music apps have also started displaying triangles over the album art.

Hamburger menu is an abstraction. Part of the blame here is on operating systems and their branded menu's (think Windows Start or OSX Apple menu). There's no standard to it, which is why native apps are a lot easier to navigate because they conform to what the user expects. That fragmentation grows when you divide by the user's browser, device, etc. It's just not standard and not contextual enough to be a standalone icon.

    why does × mean "close" when it's in the upper-right corner of a screen

But even ignoring the counterpoint to the idea that a UI element must be contextual within some category to be understandable, the idea that the hamburger menu isn't a standard OS abstraction is also just silly. Hamburger menus are for mobile devices, and in your points you're comparing them with navigation used on operating systems meant for desktops. On Android — the most-used mobile operating system in the world — the hamburger menu icon is part of the standard toolkit, is built directly into their SDK, and is called out explicitly in their specs for Material Design.

I also disagree about the pause button. It doesn't mean pause because it's next to play (that could never work; you need a different method to identify play!). It means pause because it has the pause symbol on it:

    | | pause
    |> play
    |>|> fast forward
    <|<| rewind
    |>|>| forward 1 track
    |<|<| backward 1 track

Lay them out in whatever order you want; people will get it. The important context is that you want to control the playback of something, not the order the buttons appear in.

The bigger picture here is the context, a music app - or an activity that's ongoing. The controls are grouped together, always in the same place.

I disagree about the pause button. It works equally well without context. This is anecdotal, but I have seen it successfully used in charades to mean "pause."

Now, your comparison to the hamburger menu does make sense, and I agree. However, the context for the hamburger menu might be "button that's alone" and it just means "menu." I can see that catching on.

People keep making this argument, but forgetting that context exists in the environment as well. In the context of charades, you're playing a game. It's something that's ongoing.

Now if we took out all the stop signs and replaced them with a pause symbol with yellow and black text (thus erasing the existing contextual clues we use for stop signs), we'd see how clearly context matters to symbol recognition.

The lack of a standard back button on iOS is more irritating to me. That is functionality that needs to be used more frequently and shouldn't be left as a discoverable experience on an app by app basis.

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