Comment by degenerate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by degenerate | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely loathe 'modern' UX design, not only because it seems to get too out of the way most of the time, to the point where I am struggling to find out how to locate the damn interface to begin using it in the first place. I am the go-to tech guy in most friend/family circles as many of you are, and the 'hidden' modern UI interfaces become a compounded problem when I am trying to help people over the phone. Back in the day, when helping my family first use Chrome, I'd say "click the gear icon, in the top right" - and they would find it with near 100% accuracy. Now it doesn't matter what I say... "hamburger icon" (give me a break), "three stacked bars", "triple bars" - the settings menu is no longer iconic, and modern UX has become a verbal wasteland when trying to explain anything over the phone. "Hover over the little down triangle thing to the right, then the menu pops up" ... "swipe near the edge of your screen, not too far to the right though, just tap the very edge and the menu comes up" ... these kind of explanations should not need to exist if the UX was good. At least the old games you could walk your buddy through the selections over the phone.

To add to this, I find modern UI design hinders exploration and experimentation, which is typically how people learn to interact with new objects.

When options are hidden behind strange gestures, off-screen menus, and obscure icons, how are people ever suppose to find them without prior knowledge?

After going through DOS, WIN3x, WIN9x, AQUA, ... I'm very fond of the early 90s model. WIN3, IRIX. I had deep lispiness before leading me to seek fully metacircular UIs with code as interface and interface as code (lisp machines, self, ST, node based Houdini/Shake) but nowadays, with a little more abstraction power grown by the years I really like the tiny GUIs I listed above.

Todays GUIs are stuck in some uncandy valley, too much css, not enough value.

I first saw the term hamburger menu several months back and I thought, "huh?" as I had no idea what it meant. I had to go search the net to find out that they meant those three stacked bars. Why not just call it that? It doesn't really look like a hamburger.

I had to do the same when I first heard it, a sure sign that the metaphor fails, and most of the search results were pieces explaining what a terrible idea it is. Just searched again, yep, nearly all the first page is why you should never implement it, along with BK and a stack exchange "what's the lined menu icon called".

Better question, why not just stick with a GUI element that can be described succinctly? A gear perhaps.

If the top Google results all tell you that you shouldn't do it, then why do so many people do it?

In fact I'm writing this on Firefox, which has one of those things in the browser UI...

Hamburger menu is a good short-hand when talking about UI with someone who already knows the terms.

Similar to lots of other technical or jargon terms, it's not a good description for a (new) user.

I think it went sideways when developers abandoned the menu bar accross the top of the screen like all OS X apps have, and all windows apps used to have, but are now hidden from view). I think this was replaced by icons because translation into other languages was difficult with the tools of the time, and is difficult now because even with web technologies like Angular and PoEdit making the tools side of things easy you still need someone who understands the language to do the translation. So text translations got dumped for icons, and oftentimes the icons are terrible (like the hamburger menu which is just awful imo).

The hamburger menu icon is about as old as GUI based interfaces[1]. That said, it's about time and context... knowing and having the website's logo in the top left actually be a link to the homepage and getting people to understand that took a bit of time. Also, the phone icon is probably the worst example today... most people born after 1985 have never seen a phone that even resembles the common icon/glyph (I'm a bit older than that, but still).

I do feel that the swipe from the side menus are really unintuitive, and better left tethered to an on-screen (even if it scrolls off) button/icon in addition to swipe interaction, at least until it becomes very common.

A lot of the changes are because of size constrained devices, and a return to the concept that someone can only really see or think about a few things at a time. Then again, using OSX, Windows and Linux UIs on a regular bases, along with differences in apps that are cross platform, I may be too lenient of a judge here.

[1] https://blog.placeit.net/history-of-the-hamburger-icon/

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