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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

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 OECD computer skills study, <6% of Americans are level 3 (highest) while half have only basic skills and 20% can't use computers. (https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/skills-matter_978926...)

I like the sausage link concept because it clearly labels options with text.

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> 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 testing always showed a ton of people didn't know what the three lines meant, that designers felt it would eventually become "the standard" and people would know.

Problem is, years later, tons of people still don't know what it means - every time we do user testing, words do better. I think these days design fads change so frequently that there really isn't enough time for any design to be that "standard" long enough for everyone to really grasp it.

The hamburger menu on the web is what the touch screen are for cars. You can fit anything on there, no matter what the future might hold. No need to think about your content too hard.

And in fact the designer is really not supposed to think about the content too hard. It's not how we do web. This is how we do: There's a CMS and you can add and remove items. How many? As many as the client later discovers they want.

It makes sense, kinda. It solves issues for different parties that are involved in the process. Like with touch screens in cars, we get something for what we give and it might just be the best we can reasonably do given constraints.

It's just not that great.

> The hamburger menu on the web is what the touch screen are for cars.

I thought this was a brilliant analogy. But you don't seem to have meant it.

> Like with touch screens in cars, we get something for what we give and it might just be the best we can reasonably do given constraints.

Touchscreens in cars are a huge step back from what we had in the 80s. They're far more despised than the hamburger menu. Complaints about the hamburger menu generally take a tone of disgruntled resignation. Complaints about car touchscreens are burning outrage.

There is no way touchscreens in cars can be the best we can do given constraints, because they're much worse than what they replaced.

> There is no way touchscreens in cars can be the best we can do given constraints, because they're much worse than what they replaced.

It is not about how poorly touchscreens perform against what they replace, but what they enable: A continuously developed car, built around software (updates).

I personally prefer the cars I buy to be in a finished state.

It pains me to even wonder what sort of "refreshed" UX paradigms each software update might decide to introduce.

> 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.

I wonder if those books are ever read nowadays or if the sheer number of projects requiring design skills led to uneducated masses of coders or whatever (me too) doing the job of real educated designers. And fashion, and Bootstrap and all those time saving toolkits.

If I didn't experience as much instability as I did last time I used it, I would daily drive Enlightenment as a WM for this reason.

Beautiful skeuomorphic controls, while also being lightweight and running quickly.

EDIT: I just went to Enlightenment's home page for the first time in a while and it's flat now ;_;

The original symbol represented a menu that pops up from the bottom of the screen, as they worked in the early Android versions: https://www.cnet.com/a/img/resize/06c3657d29dbfaf9cc921d2690...

The three-lines version was an evolution of that, just chopping off the sides to go extra minimal, and happened very quickly.

And nowadays we have an even more minimal one, shortening the three lines to three dots.

At least the three dots look like the ellipsis, which has a standard meaning of "there's even more..."

At the end of a list of other menu entries, there's a chance that it can be inferred to mean "let's me see some more".

I take the 3 lines to mean "click/press here for a list of something". Perhaps because people called it a hamburger, that created some extra mental friction, contributing to the confusion/hate?

I think it made more sense as a list when it was contained within a rectangle, suggesting a paper with written text.

Just the lines is abstract geometry, like the navigation buttons on android; they don't mean anything on their own.

Kebob menu isn't much better than the hamburger menu. Why are all these web affordances named after food? I'm hungry now.

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, they convey absolutely nothing, you're expected to learn them. Instead of slating this shitty design, everyone just rolls over and learns them.

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 square meant stop because the reel didn't move at all, and the play icon meant that the reel was moving to the right. Add in double arrows to denote speed. Add a line at the far left/far right to indicate beginning/end.

The hamburger has no such lineage. It started as a menu icon and changed slightly but no one had any idea what even the initial icon meant without an explanation that it's a list.

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".

>They require the user to know how the machine functions.

No, they don't. That's why they worked so well and was my entire point. All people needed to know was that they wanted to go forward, backward, or stop movement in whatever music or video was playing and that's a clear metaphorical and symbolical link. Someone with no knowledge of the function could walk up to a tape recorder and infer what the symbols meant in relation to what was happening.

The hamburger menu is not even intuitively a list and there's no connection that a user presented with it would recognize it as a call for a menu/list. There are plenty of user studies that confirm this.

> I'm really not sure what studies you're referring to (?)

We did multiple usability studies over years for a company I worked at that built a very popular mobile app. The tests were standard usability test format, where we'd ask a user to complete a task and then just say "go" and figure it out. Times where the user had to find something in the hamburger menu, when we replaced the 3 lines with words like "MENU" or "MORE" always tested better.

Designers pretty much universally hated the text version, and I do appreciate the localization challenges, but the results weren't ambiguous.

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.

> Designers like the hamburger because it lets them sweep anything they haven't considered under the rug.

Aren't you just describing all collapsible menus? I thought the complaint about the hamburger menu was specifically that the icon is unclear. It seems odd to disparage all collapsible menus, particularly on mobile where it's very easy to have a small number of reasonable menu options with no way to possible fit them onto the screen without a way to collapse them.

Other collapsible menus need a name of some sort and then can only take things /somewhat/ related to that name. The "Hamburger" can take anything.

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.

I design and I don't like them, but clients insist on them against my advice over and over. Clients routinely take informative sites and want to pare it back to minimal information, because they don't like having to write text or maintain anything. Or hide navigation because it feels like cleaning up. You'd be amazed at the ridiculous things they insist on even when there is logical or industry best/decent-practice suggesting otherwise. It's very frustrating.

Flat minimalism (compared to using words) is popular because you don't need to have translations of square, circle, and triangle into foreign languages.

(Square, circle, and triangle is also the old Electronic Arts logo, but that's probably not the reason.)

> my favorite shitty example of this is when Android expected everyone to know what a flat square, circle and triangle are supposed to mean

What is this referring to?

Edit: I'm so used to these buttons that I didn't even realize they were just simple flat shapes. It definitely would be confusing for someone new to Android or for someone who's not good with tech.

In Android[0], the "back" button on the bottom is a triangle pointing left. The "home" button is a circle. The "show recent apps" button is a square. All are just flat shapes.

Completely unintuitive to anybody that's never used Android before.

Contrast that to the early days of Android where the Back button was a curved arrow, the Home button was an icon of a house, and the Menu button was the hamburger menu people are familiar with, except the lines were thinner.

[0] This may actually vary depending on what phone you have and if the maker changes these, but on my Pixel 6, this is the description.

Back symbol pointing left is probably less intuitive if your language isn't left to right oriented. Wonder if back symbols or back animations have ever been "localized" to orient based on the language used.

It was a making-a-U-turn-and-going-left arrow, not just a left arrow.

Android sort of gets a pass in that it's something that's constantly used by the user, so there's some ability to train people into arbitrary and unclear UXes, especially if they're only a few buttons (a good example is game controllers where what buttons do is completely disconnected from the letter or symbol they're assigned).

iOS is pretty similar in that a good number of the navigation gestures aren't super intuitive and not really discoverable until you build some muscle memory.

I believe the navigation buttons on the bottom. I see no issue with them, since it's easy to associate the left triangle with back, the circle with something that affects everything and the square with something else which does something which is obvious once you tap it.

The soft buttons on Android: https://i.stack.imgur.com/YKCPp.png

Where is this from? Some sort of skin? I don't have a square at all on my Android phone, a Google Pixel (which I assume is "base" Android). You see recent apps by sliding up.

Also the triangle is only an arrow on my phone and the circle is an oval.

It's configurable in Android settings. I think you must have "2 button navigation" option selected? The default is (or used to be) 3 button and looks like the screenshot above, as far as I'm aware

https://icdn.digitaltrends.com/image/digitaltrends/android-1...

> flat square, circle and triangle

Funny enough, I had 2 android devices that had differences of opinion on what order these should be in.

But seriously, what does the hamburger icon mean?

It's three lines. A minimalist list.

> Problem is, years later, tons of people still don't know what it means

This is a problem which could get solved if every mainstream media presents this icon for 30 seconds with a short explanation for one week during the main news hour. Or every newspaper would dedicate 1/4 of a page to it for one week.

Viewers educated, problem solved. Make an exception for such an important icon.

I personally find the sausage link horrible. I have to scroll by picking the scroll bar with the mouse because the scroll wheel is not working in the demo, and it's anything but a compact display of information, unlike what you get with a drop-down popup menu.

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 normal menu anymore, then a brief and totally failed effort to talk them through finding the beyond-stupid, tiny, "everything" drawer button, I finally just told them to press the keys for the keyboard shortcut, which they won't remember and will have to ask me again next time.

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.

Remember when the way to eject a floppy or other removable disk on a Mac was to drag its icon to the trash? That was weird.

With OS X (maybe even OS 9?) the interaction was changed so that when you dragged a disk to the trash can icon, the icon changed to an eject icon (⏏), but it seems that this has been removed at some point in the last 18 years since when I went to check it, it doesn't happen anymore. On the other hand, the disk icon now has an eject button next to it in at least some Finder views.

Exactly, wave goodbye to any attempt at user consistency. Same with Win10, it launched 7 years ago and they still haven't made the the new UI standard. Try changing user passwords or system sounds or..etc. In all honesty find Linux Mint with XFCE far less mental grind than either of the predominant platforms. It has a rough edge here and there but that's it - things in general stay in place. As a result I dedicate more time to end result of my computing rather than the medium.

there kindof are, though it's very inconsistent. For example, yesterday I installed the AdGuard app, which adds a proxy and some Extensions.. When I finally realized I didn't need it and it was a paid service, and I really just needed the free AdGuard DNS, I dragged the icon to the trash....

And that also prompted me to confirm that it would delete the proxy and the Extensions that were installed.

I remember a few more apps being like that. So there ARE hooks, just not used universally. AND it won't delete personal files or preferences related to the app, which is what users are expecting these days when they delete an app, UNLESS it's an app installed from the App Store, because those store prefs and data in a different folder than regular apps..

> And that also prompted me to confirm that it would delete the proxy and the Extensions that were installed.

I would be interested if someone could point me to the mechanism used for that (triggering application-specific uninstall logic upon dragging the application to the trash).

Good question, I unfortunately have no idea of the mechanisms for this, I just know they exist and have encountered them before as a user...

Another anecdote, my mom was essentially a lifelong Windows user. I would have to answer basic tech support questions for her several times a month.

She's switched 80% of her use to an iPad and the rest to a Mac laptop, and I get a question about once a year.

YMMV.

I ended up switching my parents to iPads as well, which was a huge improvement.

I spent years thinking they [EDIT: Apple's always-top-of-screen application menus, that is] were dumb for that reason. It never occurred to me that major software vendors would be stupid and/or user-hating enough to ditch the standard top menu, when they have a whole bunch of stuff that should go in it.

I seem to recall Steve Jobs saying the reason the menu is at the top of the screen is that it's easier to hit it with the mouse, you just push it all the way up. I think it's a valid point.

I've noticed it's really nice if you like quarter- and half-screen layouts (or anything else that's sorta tiling-like). Four different programs on the screen, only one "file, edit, ..." menubar eating space.

Apple's HIG used to have a bunch of these nuggets - things about predictability of where inputs are, what was clickable, etc. Not sure how much has been preserved over the years, but the original docs are pretty legendary.

One nice thing about this too is that when you have something like a full-screen video playing, pushing the mouse to the top of the screen will reveal the menu pretty much universally. Trying to get to the application menu in full-screen on Windows is going to vary from one app to the next and has poor discoverability.

At the same time they don't utilize the 4 most easy to reach points of the screen, the corners. Windows always used those for essential interactions so the interface was really fast to use: for the start menu just throw your mouse to the bottom left corner; to close the window throw your mouse to the top right corner; to show your desktop throw to to bottom right; not sure anymore about the other corner as I am on Mac for a while already. Since switching to Mac I am always thinking about how stupid the interface is for disregarding important user-friendly details like these.

Apple has Hot Corners (configurable in the Desktop & Screen Saver > Screen Saver section of Settings) that can replicate some of the functionality that you described.

I have had my second monitor on top of my main one for the last 20 years, when I switched to a Mac this was the hardest thing to get used to.

The top menu made sense when computer screens were small and the mouse pointer thus never far away from the top, and applications were fullscreen most of the time anyway.

To me it seems the top menu bar is a holdover from early Mac OS. I saw a demo of one of the early versions of the OS, and it made a ton of sense there. The OS could only run a single application at a time, but that application could have multiple windows. From that perspective it's very sensible that whichever application had full control over the screen would want a menu bar global to its own windows.

Now though, it's just weird to have the menu bar at the top of the screen. And it's especially strange when there's no windows for the application left but the menu bar for it is still visible (something that wouldn't be strange in the single app at a time model)

Except that in this scenario, the application is still running, it just has no documents open. It's a nice thing to have because you can close all the documents in say Word, do some other work, and then when you need to open Word again, it's there ready to go without having to load again. The Mac seems to do a better job of having apps hanging out in the background than Windows does.

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 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)

- Trying to help my father disable the "get Outlook for iOS" line that suddenly started to be appended to the bottom of his work emails.

- Helping my spouse troubleshoot a Shopify app feature that prevents >1 item being subtracted from inventory at a time

- Figuring out how to enable a social media save shared photos to her phone's photo album

Yes, sometimes software is so complicated and feature rich these items have to buried deep in the settings. But often I find that the lack of obvious text labels for basic features and navigation items is the problem. Hamburger menus and the three dots "more actions" icon are a poor substitute for clear text labels and links.

The thing about modern software that infuriates me the most, watching my parents struggle with it, are the damned screen-takeover or focus-stealing on-launch notices, usually about some update they don't care about. They opened the thing to use it, not to read your changelog or marketing shit. Coupled with auto-updating, it confuses the absolute hell out of them, and the way modern design (and Android especially) make it hard to tell what's a button and what's text, and inconsistent cutesy button labels, make it even worse (it often takes them a while to figure out how to make the thing they didn't ask for and never, ever want go away). Google loves to do this pretty much everywhere, and it's especially bad on mobile, but FF desktop's post-update new-tab-to-market-at-you-about-what-changed (nothing important, 95%+ of the time) is almost as bad.

Hell, I don't like that stuff either (does anyone?) but it's just a minor annoyance for me. For them it can mean they give up trying to do whatever they wanted to do.

> The thing about modern software that infuriates me the most, watching my parents struggle with it, are the damned screen-takeover or focus-stealing on-launch notices, usually about some update they don't care about.

I would bet in almost all cases, these can be directly attributed to the developer company's poorly devised career incentives. Behind every full-screen "OMG CHECK OUT WHAT'S NEW" takeover or notification-spam lies a product manager or engineering manager whose bonus is tied to some vanity measurement of how many users are engaging with the new feature they launched. "How much of the user's attention and screen space can I take over in order to try to jam this unwanted feature down their throat and show huge usage numbers next performance review?"

> - 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.

The way Apple does it is also better design than a conventional menu bar.

I can see why FF and Chrome hide it by default. Most of the actions tucked away in it are either used infrequently, or have common keyboard shortcuts. Turning it on in Firefox makes the chrome feel cluttered to me.

By exporting the application's menu bar to an OS-provided panel that includes other OS-provided functions (clock, status indicators, wireless controls), they enforce both a strong level of consistency while allowing for reduced window clutter.

In case it's helpful: You can also tell them to right-click anywhere in the main toolbar area aside from the URL field, select "Customize Toolbar...", and then drag the "Print" button to wherever they want it. Alternatively: Hamburger menu > More tools > Customize toolbar...

I know this is besides your point, but in Firefox there is an option to turn the menu bar back on (at least until they remove the option :/).

If you go to the "Customize Toolbar" page, on the bottom left where it says "Toolbars v" you can check "[ ] Menu Bar". Hope that helps (a little)!

Or right-click on any free space on the top row. There's an option in the menu.

Or press the Alt button to show the Menu bar temporarily.

Oh you are right! That's how I was getting to the Customize Toolbar page too haha. Totally missed that!

It'd occurred to me there was probably a setting to fix it, but I've forgotten to check the last couple times I've been over, because I'm a bad son :-( Thanks for confirming my suspicion, will try to remember to change that setting for them next time.

You can also tap "alt" to make it appear, I believe, if it isn't enabled.

To help your parents, in FireFox simply pressing Alt once conjures the familiar menus (for now). They disappear as soon as they are first used or on first mouse click.

On Windows, and most Linux apps, pressing Alt reveals a menu similar to MacOS's global menu. It's basically impossibe to discover, but it's there!

I knew that from long long ago adventures in mouseless Windows-using, for focusing it, but not for causing it to appear if there isn't one. Thanks.

You can turn the regular menu on for them in the options. (Firefox: Right-click on tool bar, choose "Menu Bar" option to enable.)

The problem isn't the mechanics of the hamburger menu, it's that we use an icon to represent it. I've never seen a case where space was so scarce that the icon couldn't be replaced by the word "Menu."

Perhaps there is some issue with internationalization, but I've been to restaurants in 30+ countries, and "Menu" seems to be pretty universally-used word.

"Menu" is so overdone. How about we call it "Start"?

Hamburgers are unhealthy anyway. We could just replace the burger icon with a piece of fruit. Perhaps an apple?

This is a good point for all of us to remember, but to take it further: folk who don't understand hamburger menus aren't likely to understand that they can horizontally scroll to see more of these sausage links either. If you really really want to make sure everyone knows how it works, just make it a real-deal list of links.

At the very least, when horizontal scrolling isn't the more common use to drag a map with a "hand" pointer? In that case there is a natural mapping without any need to grab a (thin) scrollbar, if there even is one.

On mobile, with such a drag operation, I suppose one could place a finger between menu items so as to not select anything while dragging.

I can give you some anecdotal evidence that supports what you're saying.

The very large health care company I work for now is currently redesigning their global nav. We've had no less than 10-15 design working sessions. The same thing that continually comes up is the hamburger menu and how to handle it.

The reason is the company did some pretty extensive research with seniors (a big chunk of our clientele) and found many don't have any idea the hamburger menu is a standard menu now for both desktop and mobile apps. We were told we either have to use it minimally, or not at all. Its been a struggle to find something that everybody can agree on. We have a very small team of 5 people - 2 designers, 2 devs and myself (accessibility) working on this.

I also happen to work in accessibility which many of the apps/sites that use hamburger menus on mobile either create keyboard traps or are totally unusable for screen readers. I'm at least happy our company is trying to move to something different.

I don't work on accessibility, but is there a way in general for controls to have "alt text" and/or "hover text" or, God forbid, can you put 'menu' in a legible font e.g. right under a hamburger icon or vertical ellipsis? I wonder how such a text label would test in your application -- and it would arguably seem more "discoverable."

Personally, I dislike sausage links as well. Horizontal scrolling is a pain in the ass on a desktop computer with a mouse. Vertical scrolling is much more natural. Please, try to make use of the ample screen real estate on my system as that's the entire reason I own a 4K monitor.

I'd be less frustrated if I could file bugs that would get to the developers of an app / website / etc and get the issues that drive me nuts fixed. Take Google Maps: it has built in menu options to report data errors, but what about bugs with the software itself? Sometime last year a bug was introduced where if I start typing the address in "too fast" before the page finishes loading, the address characters will appear out-of-order. It's a classic FIFO / LIFO ordering bug. I suppose it's my fault for thinking I could type as soon as the text widget becomes visible on the page.

I’m curious if words do better if you test people who don’t know the language.

>Tell it to the many people who have no idea what it means on a mobile device, or increasingly on desktop websites

The hamburger menu is literally used everywhere. Why should we design things for tech illiterate boomers. The most popular apps and websites use it. It's ubiquitous.

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 what it is every time.

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 every other line being indented, and then a \ or a / here and there, it would look like something folded up, and I would think, "Oh, unfold this thing." But three horizontal lines just ... no, I got nothin'.

The other thing to note is that traffic signs are designed to alert people of one particular thing and are intended to be language neutral. Hamburger menus are designed to conceal multiple things and the contents are usually in a specific language.

It's an iconic representation of a list or menu. You learn it once, and it works everywhere. And it fits on a small screen.

I encourage you to go watch a novice computer user. After seeing them struggle I suspect you'll change your mind.

I personally view the hamburger menu similar to my junk drawer at home. It's where the designer stuffs crap that isn't very important. So, it's the last place I look for when I need to get something done in an app.

Just this week I was on three different customer calls where I had to explain to a relatively technical user (they use our website on a daily basis for their job) what the hamburger menu in Chrome was. None of them understood that it was a thing that they could click on to get to other options. It's just not intuitive.

'You learn it once' is doing quite a lot of work there. I tend to use a hamburger labeled with 'Menu'

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

At least when hovered upon (with a mouse or pointer) that vertical ellipsis shows both a grey disk and the text "Customize and control Google Chrome". Happily, that suggests one could click on it and not directly invoke an unwanted operation.

I don't know the equivalent works for phone or tablet users with no such thing (AFAIK) as hover. To me, that's a problem with such interfaces beyond the hamburger icon.

Icons don’t work with on page search (e.g CTRL+F).

And it’s hard to describe icons to someone else on the phone. I‘m not sure if Word is still the mess it used to be, but this kind of interface design can be really hard to understand and learn. Currently for me this is Blender. The software is complex, the interface mirrors this, but if you’re new to it, this is really hard to learn.

I guess after a point it is simply inherent complexity. Like, I can’t even imagine a GUI that would make someone seeing it for the first time know some semi-advanced feature in Word.

First of all, the whole problem domain has to be taught/discovered. And sure, people often learn by trial-and-error and it makes sense to try to maximalize this sort of discoverability in all software, but I would say that it doesn’t scale. Even with the “better” labeled menus, gimp is not intuitive to say the least.

So perhaps the (often annoying) teach you by showing is the better direction? My gripe with it is that it is often applied for trivial mobile apps for things like “search by using the search bar”.. but I think an all-menu/all-action text-based search functionality would be a must as well.

In MacOS you can search the menu of GUI apps. This helps discovery so much.

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