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Comment by freeone3000 | Hacker News Reader

Except modern UI design sort of threw the aspect of discoverability out the window. Context-sensitive elements, dependent elements, hidden elements, and the dreaded hamburger menu are all awful for discoverability, and they're present on nearly every GUI.

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For everything negative you can say about modern UI patterns like the hamburger menu, lack of discoverability isn‘t one of them imho. You have a single button with an almost-standardized icon, from which you can get an overview of all the (non-context-sensitive) actions. Relative to menu bars, the actions are sorted more by their importance than some vague categories. (Where do you find Settings? Under File, Edit or Help? No, as a top-level entry of the hamburger menu.) Of course it has its own problems, like number of clicks...

Hamburger menus work because software that employs them is trivial. Often not far from a toy MVP. Discoverability is easy when there's not much to discover.

All the pre-Web UI patterns start to shine when you're working with more powerful software tools - where there are more than half-dozen available actions, so you can't just stuff them under a single hamburger list. You have to start categorizing, grouping actions by their commonalities. You can't sort by importance, because importance changes from minute to minute.

And menus of old were plenty discoverable. They weren't categorized for discoverability, because that's not the job of categorization. If you want to discover what the software can do, you spend 60 seconds expanding every single menu and reading available options. The categorization is there to introduce grouping concepts that are easy to remember, so that next time you're looking for an action you know (or suspect) exists, you know where to look for it.

There's always a space tradeoff, of course. If you didn't make some things contextual or put them behind a menu, you'd have to find permanent space for it on-screen. At some point, your UI then turns into a "Find Waldo" scenario.

Correction, on nearly every GUI since 2009 (introduction of the iPad).

Also, compared to the others you mentioned, hamburger menus are the most discoverable.

Yeah I'm confused about what OP meant was wrong with hamburger menu, the paradigm is "if the screen is too small for File | Edit | View | Etc. | Help, then collapse them behind the hamburger, which is generally good and sane.

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