> Whenever I see a hamburger menu I silently think "Here someone has given up"
Can you explain what you don’t like about hamburger menus?
Can you explain what you don’t like about hamburger menus?
Has someone hidden the zoom buttons in there? How about print? Perhaps that's also where save is, or tab colour? Most things in the hamburger menu are completely unrelated but exist for the removal of context. Button outlines so you have no idea what you can and cannot click on as well, which is mentioned in the fine article, are all modern design patterns. Looks over functionality.
Hamburger menu is just peak modern menus. Lazy.
Or we can look at it from the other side. "Where do I find the settings for this app?". Is it in File, Edit, View, Tools or Help. The answer depends on the app. Menus can be well organized or poorly organized but I don't think we should be banishing menus. The hamburger icon is just an iconic, space efficient way to say "menu"
For example, on Mac: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
And on Windows: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/cmd-m...
> "Where do I find the settings for this app?". Is it in File, Edit, View, Tools or Help?
On Mac, it should be in the "App" menu and called "Preferences...", it should be the first item in the menu, except if you have an "About YourAppName" item which always goes at the top with a seperator underneath.
On Windows, it should be in the "Tools" menu, and called "Options...". 4 On Linux, it should be under the "Edit" menu, and called "Preferences".
If it's not, then the app (in my opinion) is broken. Of course, many apps are lazily ported across platforms or "hamburgerized". The Windows situation is obviously also more messy because of the newer "ribbon" standards complicating things a bit, but there are right answers.
(edit: fixed links)
> On Linux, it should be under the "Edit" menu, and called "Preferences".
This one is a stretch, there are no such consistent and agreed-upon guidelines.
My point here is that just because things can be abused (or even, in the case of desktop applications, are almost _always_ abused), doesn't mean the general concept is useless or should be removed from applications. I would recommend instead of trying to cram a hundred possible actions into a tiny icon bar at the bottom of your iPhone, or removing 97 of those actions from the app itself and leaving just the most basic three down there, to maybe consider building a sensible and well-arranged menu layout _if and when_ you need more than those three that you can fit at the bottom.
You mean well researched guidelines with tons of evidence behind their decisions [1] that are as relevant today as they were 20 years ago.
> almost all applications ignore.
That most current applications ignore because people think they are ancient rarely updated guidelines.
This is especially evident in the MacOS world. HIG were the guide on the platform, and developers tried to adhere to them. And then the new breed of "designers" took over and even Apple breaks nearly every single one of them [2]
Microsoft has always been worse when it came to enforcing consistency of user interfaces, but even their choices were never random until quite recently [3].
[1] Apple's original HIG even had a bibliography section because it was actual research, and not some Dribble showcase: https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/144740917559669965... and https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/144771024771228057... etc.
[2] See, e.g. their abomination of an App Store https://grumpy.website/post/0RsaxCu3P
[3] Even the ribbon menus they introduced in Office weren't a random choice. They surely are now. See the Why the UI blog series: https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn...
> And on Windows: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/cmd-m...
Both links return 404.
Nowadays it's just a random hodge-podge no one knows how to use properly.
Does it ? This is the issue when people see no more as their own OS.
In the past, just like today, there were multiple modes to exit a program. One of them is to press Exit and the programm will exit cleanly. The other is to press the X in the window corner in Windows ( or send a close message from a window manager) which, depending on the implementation, might lose data. There is also the option to kill the process. Now in my opinion this Exit is a good thing and it is clear what is doing.
Well, unless it's an Electron app. Which is another good reason to avoid them altogether.
A poor menu layout can be fixed. A hamburger menu will always be a byzantine mix of everything because everything has to be in there. There is no organization, except flyout menus--which were a problem with traditional menu designs, but you could organize without them.
Hell, some applications have just moved the traditional menu behind the hamburger. Why? Because that was a good way to organize operations, even if it wasn't perfect, or wasn't always perfectly implemented.
Happy to know I am not the only one who considers this weird.
It would probably make more sense to have an "Application" menu before "File". It could contain things like "About", "Help", "Setting" and "Exit". (Especially in cases where the current "Help" menu only contains "Show help" and "About". If it has more than five items, then I'd say it deserves a separate menu.)
The hamburger is kind of a weird breed of design signaling because of it. In some desktop apps it still is the original top menu, but not always. On websites and apps it can vary tremendously.
However, a top menu is not an expert level mode, it’s a beginners / proficient level mode. Expert level means using keyboard shortcuts.
Context driven display and modes are far more valuable when meeting spacial constraints. But that can be hard when you are dealing with many form factors and so the quick fix is the hamburger.
This is true when you use only an editor and a debugger. When you need to use 10 programs each with its own keyboard shorcuts (which, BTW you need to search in internet which they are because the company doing the software did not bother to make them accessible in a help menu) you're gonna have a hard time. In the (1985) past you had for such things a holder attached to your keyboard where you had a listing of those keyboard shortcuts. Now the world has evolved and we have ... tada... the hamburger menu. P.S. I would not feel good as a developer to know that someone , somewhere curses me and my family constantly for the work i done.
At least on macOS and Windows the shortcuts are shown in the (traditional) menu bar. With GNOME's use of hamburgers, it's anyone's guess. As someone who likes shortcuts, I found it very hard to figure out shortcuts in GNOME apps that have a lot of functionality hidden away. (Aside from keyboard shortcuts not being very consistent between apps on Linux.)
Slightly related: somehow, FF on Linux allows you to rearrange tabs from keyboard. Ctrl+Shift+PgUp/PgDown move the current tab left or right. As far as I can tell, this feature is only available on Linux. I have no idea why. It's much more convenient than dragging the tabs with mouse, because you don't have to worry about accidentally detaching the tab into its own window.
I feel the same way about notifications. Both native notifications and notifications via e-mail.
It is no longer easy to find out if something changed or happened in most websites/applications. You must be bombarded with notifications all the time, and god forbid you take an extended break or something goes into your spam folder, because if you snooze you lose.
JIRA for me is the worst in this regard.
61 unread notifications from Az Devops? Nah, I don't need to read those. I was watching that build in the background, I know it failed.
Mobile notifications should offer more filtering options at the system level. Why do I need to trust an app developer to respect my notification preferences? Why should I rely on the developer to build granularity into their push notification frequency?
It all gets simpler when you can filter at the 'inbox'.
But instead of being an ordinary honest menu where half the items has their defined places on each OS and the rest can be found easily it is a jumbled mess.
And since there are no standards as for where to put things in a hamburger menu they can move around between each release of the application.
And the only reason to use it instead of an honest menu is because Chrome does it so therefore it must be a good idea. Period.
It is somewhat ironic that even as desktop screens get larger and larger applications has to "maximize real screen estate" by removing menus, while simultaneously working to remove real screen space improvements like the option of Tree Style Tabs on Firefox (yes, it kind of works and it is still awesome but it get harder and harder by the year).