Comment by leepowers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leepowers | Hacker News Reader

> "But I Have No Choice!"

> I see this argument pop-up frequently when taking to design leaders or developers. I call bullshit on this excuse. You absolutely have the choice to avoid implementing bad designs - that's your job! Either you're not fighting hard enough against those pushing for it, or you're just trying to build a "pretty" portfolio.

sigh I'm so tired of this absolutist, ranty way of thinking. Its indicative of Twitter-brain or social media outrage brain. Design is almost always a collaborative process. You literally have no controlling choice on the outcome, because the choice itself is being made by multiple stakeholders, be it your customers, your coworkers, your clients, etc.

Also, the author lists himself as the "UX Designer & Front-End Engineer @ Donorbox." Their web site at https://donorbox.org appears to be using a hamburger menu on mobile. I hope he isn't beating himself up over it.

It's hard to move away from established UI patterns like a hamburger menu because stakeholders expect it, and I suspect users look for that little hamburger icon as well.

when the did anyone start expecting a hamburger menu? all these old websites i used to poke clearly labeled buttons on all of a sudden have three lines one year. its like all these web3 node js assholes took over the planet within an 18 month cycle and brainwashed everyone.

im old. i expect buttons with words on them.

now i have to spend a significant amount of my time, hours per year, explaining to users to click the "thing with the three lines, then scroll down, there should be a menu that says XYZ, no, you have to go down farther, its between PDQ and ABC. no its not categorized very well i agree. i agree nobody would know what three lines mean. ".

> when the did anyone start expecting a hamburger menu?

It's probably related to the rise in popularity of Bootstrap

>It's hard to move away from established UI patterns like a hamburger menu

>when the did anyone start expecting a hamburger menu? all these old websites i used to poke clearly labeled buttons on all of a sudden have three lines one year. its like all these web3 node js assholes took over the planet within an 18 month cycle and brainwashed everyone.

That's why it's really not established, nobody really wanted a hamburger to begin with when websites used to be able to afford to serve steak.

The appearance of such a non-satisfying menu item has always lacked the flavor that attracts patrons the most.

First, I actually like hamburgers! Probably prefer them to steak, to be honest - especially when cost is factored in.

The problem, as I see it: people went from nice useful computer screens to these tiny phones, with very narrow horizontal space. If you show up to a restaurant and can't eat steak, the smarter restauranteurs are going to adjust.

Some sites are able to figure it out, but lets not blame the proprietors for giving the people what they want: a horizontally tiny viewport for nav. If you use that space for nav, you don't use it for actual content - I'm sure people in this forum hate that as well.

Good comment, I also think there may now be more consumers using tiny touch phones who never had useful computer screens to begin with.

Something about the lowest common denominator, whether that can be considered real progress or not.

> You absolutely have the choice to avoid implementing bad designs - that's your job!

Ha, seems like this someone doesn't know when and where to pick their battles. Yes, sometimes you can really push for change when you come up with a real, convincing argument. Or, A/B test the crap out of it.

When I was on the front-end of the stack, it really taught me "disagree and commit" often with product and design. Unless it's something existential, there's almost no reason to accept "good enough", move forward, measure, and iterate.

yeah this is an odd article. hamburger menus are not perfect, but they do the job and they’re expected by the user, which is important in UI

this article’s main justification for them being poor is that they don’t work well without a mouse and/or when you have javascript turned off. okay there are times and places and people for whom javascript will be off, that’s understandable, but still rare. who is browsing the internet with just a keyboard though?

they’re fixing an issue for the vanishingly few by worsening the experience of overwhelming majority, and acting as if this is an obvious solution that developers are too blighted to see

There are people that can't use a mouse and have to use keyboard navigation.

The negative attitude against towards accessibility vexes me greatly. Are wheelchair ramps a pointless waste of money because the vast majority of people can walk just fine? Should we not care about making cities safer for blind people because they are just a small minority?

These kinds of attitude wouldn't be socially acceptable in the "real world" but the web still likes to pretend that it is the Wilde West. And yes, actively excluding people from being able to use your services is a bigger problem than you site being slightly less pretty.

Non-visible links from a menu can be read and selected just fine by a screen reader, it just needs a little care.

I don’t believe that you’re replying to the strongest possible interpretation of what I said. you’re replying to a strawman that you’ve allowed to make you angry

the point is that a ramp is of equal use to a non-disabled person as a disabled one. what this author wants is to make everyone use stairlifts

People with disabilities (mostly vision impaired) browse the internet with "just a keyboard" or a screen reader. It's quite cumbersome, but for some people, that's the best they can do.

At a previous job, we had to follow their extensive rules for making everything accessible. A few things that I can remember:

* minimum contrast ratio

* support for the high-contrast mode that some browsers have

* screen reader support for every UI element - this requires a ton of different things

* everything must be usable without a mouse

There were tools to check for a lot of this. There was a separate team of accessibility people who would check the result and create tickets for things that were not good enough.

It was annoying when the designers specified low-contrast colors, then we'd build it with the colors specified by the designers, and then the tool tells us the colors are unacceptable. Why can't the designers check the contrast ratio of their colors?

Testing with a screen reader was extremely annoying (because it reads a description of the currently focused item), but it gave me a lot of empathy for the poor people for whom this is the only way to use a web UI.

lmao, as if the designer is in charge of what they’d like to do 90% of the time.

and thank the gawds for that. it's like letting the Jony Ive types rule the world.

It also has the typical annoying dialog open 2 secs after opening the page.

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