The hamburger-menu icon today: Is it recognizable? | Hacker News Reader

The hamburger-menu icon today: Is it recognizable?

nngroup.com

109 pointsthm174 comments

The hamburger menu would be fine, even great, if it was a standard menu that every mobile app had in the same place with the same look [0]. But its purpose, positioning, and look is different in every app, so it’s just one more thing to click on to see what it does. It also doesn’t make sense as soon as you have more than one menu [1], or on the desktop — mostly because a single menu rarely makes sense on the desktop, and because an icon tends to be a much smaller pointer target compared to a regular labeled menu, for such a main entry point.

[0] like in Windows 1.0, I guess: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4e/Windows1.0.pn...

[1] unless it’s a secondary but universal menu like the Windows system menu in [0]

On that matter, I don't get Android's design trajectory: They used to have exactly that: A standard button in the OS for the app context menu, on some devices even a physical button. For some reason, they got rid of it in newer versions, so every interested app has to implement it itself, which of course causes to UI to become wildly inconsistent between apps. I don't understand why.

That was 15 years ago.

They had enough fun getting app developers to support the back button properly, let alone the context menu!

In truth Android has suffered from the fact everyone starts on iOS first and then ports to Android, screen by screen in many cases, meaning accommodation of Android specific UI flows simply doesn't happen.

The removal of physical buttons was largely motivated by OEMs wanting to eliminate moving parts which make things far more expensive to build/test than simply one slightly bigger capacitive touchscreen.

physical buttons are also a pain for waterproofing

I'm pretty sure on most phones those buttons were just an extension of the digitizer / touchscreen backlight.

The problem with the old Android menu button was that you never knew whether or not there was a menu, and what would be in the menu. Some apps had navigation, some had actions. Some apps had different things on different screens.

The usual pattern on Android nowadays is that hamburgers go on the left, actions go on the right. And an on-screen button is much more obvious than a hardware key, or something on the never changing bottom bar.

I recently had to resume using Windows extensively after a long hiatus, and the regressions I had already noticed in occasional use remain an infuriating PITA every damned day. It's not a matter of adjustment to something different. It's a matter of incompetent UI.

The elimination of the standard menu bar in one application after another is a huge one. Look at Edge: I wanted to save a PDF I was viewing. Fat chance.

There's no menu. In the toolbar past the URL box there's a jagged Pac-Man that I guess is supposed to be yet another "gear" icon. Then there's a star with lines in it for "favorites" and then your own avatar and then three dots with a tiny upward pink arrow overlapping part of one of them.

In the upper-left corner of the window there are more boxy icons... let's see what those are... "Workspaces" and "Tab actions menu."

So is "save file" under Gear-Man, the three dots, or somewhere else?

And BTW, WHAT APPLICATION IS THIS? You have no idea which window belongs to which one, because the title bars are missing.

What a truly incredible, pathetic mess. The Mac's single menu bar is a UI blunder, but NO menu bar is monumentally stupid.

Somewhere along the way I have lost title bars to know the title of each tab in my browser, whether firefox or brave. I don't know if I need to set it in the browser, or kde, or kwin, i also tried microsoft windows and the same behavior.

In Firefox if you right-click the title bar and "Customize Toolbar..." you can check Title Bar.

Thank you for putting in words what has been subconsciously annoying me about modernized windows applications. It seems like they are consistently worse with no recognizable improvements.

Who is to blame? Is it the UI people wanting a "clean" look or is it misguided UX people?

I think it's people who lack

1. Experience

2. Aptitude

3. Supervision

And then there are the apologists who attack anyone who calls for better, and almost the entire rest of the population... who

1. Don't take time to convey feedback

2. Can't find a way to convey feedback

3. Can't distill exactly why the product sucks and formulate feedback.

I just wasted a good portion of my afternoon trying to activate change-tracking in Word. The Word UI is an even bigger POS than the rest of Windows. I mean... it's a wonderland of baffling rabbit-holes, to the point where I'm laughing while typing this out because it seems like a prank. MS even eschewed their own File dialog in this thing, to replace it with a page that looks like hand-coded HTML without a stylesheet. Truly incredible.

So I took screen shots. I wrote up a detailed explanation as to why this is defective. And then I used MS's "Feedback Hub" (which vanishingly few people are going to find or bother with) to try to file a report. After typing it all out and attaching files...

"Something went wrong. Please try again later."

And of course it deleted all my work. And it has happened on four attempts throughout the day.

So when companies claim, gee, no one has complained before... it's just another mockery of the recipient.

It's cultural. The way things look are more important than they way they work. In fact its way way more important. People will almost always choose pretty and useless over not-as-pretty and functional.

But those are not exclusive. Look at the File "dialog" in Word now. Seriously, take a look at this mess and then see if that is "prettier" than a proper File dialog on ANY platform.

I’m also astounded at the loss of density.

Open Word/WordPerfect in Win95. Toolbar filled with lots of unique tiny icons that do useful things. Doesn’t take up much space.

Now we have an enormous ribbon with a few gigantic icons, with most of the functionality buried in tiny submenus triggered only by clicking an tiny arrow in a corner that seem to have been inspired from The Net.

Call me crazy - I didn’t dream of high resolution monitors so I can have a toolbar that occupies a bigger percentage of the screen NOW than it did in the days of 640x480 computing. I’d much rather see my document instead.

I hate UI trends for the past 20 years.

I can't figure out if you're talking about Chrome or Edge but both browsers have made so many bad UI decisions

"Look at Edge: I wanted to save a PDF I was viewing. Fat chance."

Relevant: I had to quit using Firefox though, because of the brain-dead bookmarks being buried several levels deep in menus, and worse in the mobile version.

Enable the menu bar in Firefox - given this thread, that'll probably be a great joy for you. I love the menu bar, it's so convenient.

Thanks. I particularly hated the burying of bookmarks on mobile, so is there a way to address that?

You mean how it defaults to a different folder? Yeah, no idea on that one. Mozilla needs to give bookmarks some love imo, but I think far fewer people use them than one might expect.

I know the this isn't the thrust, but the "jagged pac-man" is actually supposed to be a puzzle piece, and symbolizes plugins.

The three dots at the right, for some reason, is the menu. It's labelled "Settings and more", and contains the gear icon you were thinking of, but also all of the normal menu items like new window and print. It also contains "Save page", but befuddlingly that one is hidden under another flyout menu called "More tools".

When opening a PDF file in Edge, it loads up some kind of Acrobat embedding for me, and that one has its very own "save file" button, though with identical iconography to Edge's. Thankfully, the button is visible without any further menu diving, but is also placed at the top right, with an extremely faint border delineating it from the Edge chrome.

Mmmm, thanks. I don't remember finding plug-in-related stuff under there. But I'll take a look tomorrow.

If that's supposed to be a puzzle piece, it's a disgrace. Just another symbol of Microsoft's abject design bankruptcy. They had far better icons than that at 16 x 16 pixels 30 years ago.

Sure enough, this entire button is devoted to plug-ins... which the vast majority of users are likely to have none of.

Another fine UI choice by today's Microsoft.

I've seen apps with a hambuger, gear, and ellipsis button all on the front page. Why? For what possible reason?

I truly don't understand why we do this to ourselves.

Around 10 years ago I thought they were a terrible practice. A win for graphic designers that wanted simple and nice looking at the expense of usability.

But over time people learn and its standard. And as the NN group article points out: it has become familiar and known today.

My favorite iteration of this was in the This American Life mobile app that used a graphic of an actual hamburger instead of 3 stacked gray lines. This was also about 10 years ago I believe. Unfortunately I can't find any reference or graphic depicting it.

People get used to everything. Including war. Just because they learn how to pull through, does not mean it's any good.

But the designs literally go from bad to good once people know how to use them. Unlike war, which is bad whether people are used to it or not. If you're insisting the hamburger design is bad for some other reason rather than people not knowing how to use it, it's the same mistake the designers made in the first place when they insisted it was good despite people not knowing how to use it.

False

  > go from bad to good once people know how to use them

perhaps, but there is still the issue or cognitive load in certain designs or combination of designs even if people are used to them, which can objectively make them 'better' or 'worse' vs others

It's been 10 years and my parents are still clueless

"What is that? Why don't they put 'menu' there?"

I don't know dad, I'm not the one who made it

Can you please let them know to change it? Someone should tell them

Text labels add SO much in terms of usability. I don't know why we got away from them. I guess they don't look as pretty.

Not an option, because it makes it harder work to sell a product to the Chinese.

the RTL languages are also a pain point, and even German can make your UI designing difficult for length of words. Really, the high variability of width for i18n'ed words in general is I think where the icon-heavy approach originated.

I was using a cheap device the other day and it had:

[◂] [xxx] [▸]

Left button was UP and right button was DOWN (numbers e.g. temperature).

Is there any reason that ◂ would be UP in Chinese?

Sort of. 上 means both up and previous, 下 means down and next. Maybe there was miscommunication about contexts when the button meant next and when it meant down in the UI.

The question of whether that's a good thing is a different matter, however.

The brain is better with images once it has been trained to recognize them. Just sucks for the people that never got the training.

No it isn't. That's why hieroglyphics became indecipherable for nearly 2000 years, while all the various alphabetic systems invented during that time--and many of those invented long before--remained readable.

Ugaritic certainly didn't remain readable and it was alphabetic. The only reason alphabetic systems remained readable is because they remained in use.

uhhh I can pick out a person shaped icon from a column of icons faster than the word person from a column of words

The problem is not only do all text labels have different sizes in one language, they also have completely different unrelated sizes in other languages.

Standardized icons can be laid out easily regardless of language

I've heard that argument... used multiple times, for an application which would basically never be in any other language but English.

I hope your parents never have to deal with European appliances, the controls of which are often labeled with mysterious icons instead of words.

Easy i18n? They don't have to translate the UI to 30+ languages.

Yes, that's the obvious reason for it, but having a reason doesn't make the icons any more comprehensible. Good luck using those appliances if you're a visitor who doesn't have the manuals and hasn't learned each manufacturer's unique iconography.

Instead of having words that are only understood by speakers of one language, they choose icons that aren't understood by any.

For better or for worse, English is a lingua franca in the EU. (Sorry, France.)

That's depends very much on age, class, geographic location. Someone could have grown up imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain, hence learning Russian as a second language. Nonetheless they deserve appliances, websites and infrastructure which they can use and understand.

When I explained what this icon was called to my ~70yo mother, she said it should be called the pancake menu instead. I agree and have been saying that ever since.

Playing with some of my older iDevices recently, I realized that, to me, the page curl icon is the best indicator of "more stuff in here."

To refresh your memory: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/BJBDGA/apple-iphone-3gs-3g-smartph...

  > pancake menu

for me it was when someone told me it was the 'air duct icon'... its almost as if there is some errant skeuomorphism hiding in there somewhere....

When I first saw it, I called it "what the fuck is this?".

Then I learned that it's called a hamburger menu.

Ever since, I call it "another fucking hamburger menu".

Text requires effort to translate, and might not fit well for some languages and some UIs. So managers don't want to pay for translations & thus want only icons, and designers don't want to make UIs that work for wildly different label widths. This is not unique to hamburger menus, but it does mean that "just replace it with the word 'Menu'" will be rejected.

Hamburger menus are annoying because they add a click. They can save some screen space on small devices by allowing most of the top area which would be covered by a menu bar to be clear, with only a single button in the corner. This is pretty useless on larger displays (laptops, desktops, etc.) but makes sense on phones, and sometimes on smaller tablets.

Hiding options happens even with traditional menus. Do you change application settings under Edit->Preferences, or is it File->Settings, or Tools->Options, or something else? Or worse, do you change some things in Edit->Preferences, others in Tools->Options, and yet more in File->Settings?

Hamburger menus aren't always bad design, but they often allow hiding bad design by making the UX worse. Attempting to unify UI across wildly different interface types (desktops, laptops, tablets, & phones) inevitably leads to bad design & bad UX. Keeping a common color scheme or overall style is fine, but the interaction patterns of the different input schemes (keyboard & mouse, keyboard & touchpad, touchscreen) are different enough that UIs need to vary between device types for a good UX.

> Text requires effort to translate

Localization used to be a massive, expensive undertaking, but with all the cheap translation services we have today, I doubt it still is. I wonder of there will be a shift at some point, where more text-heavy GUIs will make a comeback if translation is cheap.

>cheap translation services we have today

Which seemingly put out cheap translations. At least in my experience with modern Anime/Movies/Videogames. You can always tell when actual human effort was put into localization and not just machine translation.

with all the cheap translation services we have today, I doubt it still is

My company employs a number of full-time translators, some of whom do translations for my web site.

When I talk with them, they all say that computer translations, while improving, are still terrible. They spend a lot of time fixing Google translations that make it into mockups, and sometimes try to show me why the computers are wrong. I don't speak their languages, so it's usually lost on me, though I've learned that there's about 50 different ways to say certain words in Spanish between Arizona and Tierra del Fuego.

Could they be protecting their jobs? If that's all they did for the company, then maybe. But translation is only about 25% of their work, so they'd still be employed. A few long for good internet-based translation so they can do other things.

> I've learned that there's about 50 different ways to say certain words in Spanish between Arizona and Tierra del Fuego.

You may enjoy: "Oh, how hard it is to speak Spanish!" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LjDe4sLER0)

There's also a separate upload with Spanish subtitles.

Certain words, yeah. Most words, no.

I hit a link labeled "reply" to write this comment. A good translation requires context to tell if that is a verb or a noun. Providing that context is the hard and expensive part. Skip it and you get a terrible result.

  > Hamburger menus are annoying because they add a click.

this is probably biggest issue with them ime, i've seen conversion rates drop pretty badly with hamburgers because people tend to just tap it, open it, fail to read everything in there and just close it again; if its not right in front of the user its gonna be used/noticed much less

Yes, I recognize that I can click on it to see a menu.

No, I never have any idea whatsoever what items that menu will contain.

Because there realistically is no way to know.

Which is more than enough reason to hate the concept.

Another reason is that I'm being exposed to them, despite not having a smartphone. I'm being exposed to them in a desktop environment, where the screen space savings are simply irrelevant. Including in applications that target the desktop. Thank you, GNOME.

> With hamburger icons, position has a major impact on interpretation. Users generally understand the icon to mean "categories hidden here" as long as it appears in the expected spot: the top-left corner of the screen.

I think this more likely represents users learning "you can click in the top-left corner of the screen to get a menu", without necessarily even thinking about the graphic rendered there.

On my personal website I decided to have a button that has both hamburger icon and the word "menu" (on mobile version). Had no complaints!

https://vlad.studio/

Not related to the original post, but I have been visiting your site for 15+ years now, and it's one of my favorite online art sites. Really grateful for your many years of beautiful work.

Wow, I forgot about this place, but 15 years ago it was my favorite source of wallpapers. The art is as beautiful as ever.

So are some of the accompanying texts:

> This picture is dedicated to Kiev (Kyiv), a capital of Ukraine. It is loosely based on a 13-th century map - this is what center of Kyiv looked like ~900 years ago! The original map also included the city wall - however, I decided not to wrap the buildings into the wall, since in my dream world, a city would not need walls.

https://vlad.studio/wallpaper/kyiv/

You are violating one of the key principles from the article though by being bottom-right

(On a side-note, receiving no complaints doesn't mean things are usable)

Cool website though

I wish I was sufficiently dexterous to use your razor thin scrollbars. :(

Use your mouse wheel or Page/arrow keys?

Why not just recreate the [original experiment](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menus/) rather than citing a book that uses different methodology?

Given the original study shows quite comprehensively how bad a design pattern it is, it would be far more interesting to see that research repeated rather than a test on hamburger variations.

This one was better: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menus/

Our findings show that, across all 3 different metrics, hidden navigation significantly decreases user experience both on mobile and on desktop.

Both on mobile and desktop, the content discoverability was significantly lower when the navigation was hidden. This measure showed a more than 20% drop in discoverability on sites with hidden navigation, compared with sites with visible or combo navigation. In other words, visible or combo navigation made people more likely to complete the task successfully and without relying on search.

I assumed that hamburger description was after-the-fact, not the original designation. It always felt that way to me.

I think the graphic itself was intended to represent a menu: a list of items.

It was, it's a simplified version of the original that included the border around the lines, similar to one of the examples in the article (imagine a physical restaurant menu). Along the same lines, the three lines have since been further simplified into three dots in a lot of places - no longer looking hamburger-like.

> three dots

The kebab

It’s just difficult to describe, so instead of “click on the three horizontal lines thing” it’s easier to say “hit the hamburger” and the name stuck. I guess if they were going to just have an abstract meaningless icon they should have picked something easier to describe over the phone, for example.

The article says 'positon the Hamburger in the top left corner', but many sites have it in top right too.

Yeah, I assumed the standard was actually top-right...

I'd be interested in people's thoughts about which side is best, or if it just doesn't matter.

I don't think it matters which side. What matters more is that everyone does it the same. Most times, I see it on the right.

You're never going to get app developers to independently agree on one consistent way to do anything. In fact, many of them will deliberately do the opposite of what everyone else does, for nebulous "brand differentiation" reasons.

Most of us Westerners read left-to-right, while being right-handed.

Thus:

"Where should I go?" is answered quickly in the top-left.

Whilst experts repeatedly accessing on Mobile requires top-right.

Just depends on your priorities.

> Whilst experts repeatedly accessing on Mobile requires top-right.

Surely bottom-right?

Putting anything but your page content for me to drag to scroll in the bottom half, right third of a mobile site is a capital offense, IMO.

I think of its default as "top left". But "top right" is frequent.

"Not quite top, mostly right" is where IBM puts their SECOND hamburger icon on DNG software. May they rot in eternity...

My I present GNOME:

https://woltman.com/media/posts/244/gr-menus-moving-around-3...

Because having a full menu bar at the top made it too easy to find options.

A full menu bar would take up too much space, then they wouldn't have room to put huge amounts of padding everywhere.

The Gnome team lives in constant terror of the end user customizing absolutely anything. So even when they allow it they make sure it's undiscoverable.

The article is wrong on that. Top left is "reserved" for the logo, top right for a menu. That's learned behaviour all across the "left to right" world.

A good compromise would be to place it in the middle. That way everybody is equally unhappy

I think 3 of them would better communicate the goal.

Most people use their right hand to interact with a mobile phone so it makes more sense to put it on the right side.

That's great, because the "move this panel" symbol, that is composed by a set of horizontal lines, is usually on the top-right too.

Last year I had two experienced :) people come up to me in person with their phones asking how to open the menu in an app I made that they use at live events, and I had to show them the hamburger icon.

I've since added "show menu" next to the icon in that app.

Depends on your audience.

The hamburger menu is a pet peeve of mine! It takes much less cognitive load to simply read the word “menu”.

Also, it used to be important when screens were nowhere near as wide but now there’s no longer any reason to use it the way it is.

Perhaps it is permissible on a busy UI with many buttons, but that job was taken by the ellipses, which also takes less cognitive burden!

I couldn't agree more. The hamburger menu is in my list of the worst UI elements around. It has nothing good to recommend it.

It's barely tolerable in situations where screen space is at a premium, but it's still pretty awful.

> Its growing ubiquity helped standardize its meaning: Through repeated exposure, users learned to recognize and interpret the icon with increasing confidence.

Sure: it's the symbol of the "junk drawer" of the UI. Who knows what random assortment lurks in there? It's a place you go only as a last resort.

I'm curious, not a UI designer at all here, but what's so taxing about the hamburger? I grew up with it mostly always around and never even thought twice about it..

Any symbolic visual takes time for our brains to decode. When compared to language which we’ve spent our entire lives decoding and which comes much naturally, the cognitive burden is much higher.

In addition the three bars are as mundane of a composition as you can get, so it doesn’t capture the eye well to begin with. Typically the eye gets pulled to more visually complexity.

But ultimately it boils down to the decoding idea—language is the ultimate “codec” of human communication.

Isn't text a "symbolic visual"? I would think that at some point a symbol that's used as frequently as the hamburger icon would/could eventually become equivalent to the word.

> Typically the eye gets pulled to more visually complexity.

Written words have a "voice" - that part of your mind that recognizes something spoken. Hamburger menu icons don't have that, nor do they have the higher contrast or complexity that emoji have.

The implication of "load" is not that it's a huge hurdle, but just that it takes longer (even a tiny bit) for most users to visually assess what it means. Add up all those little delays, and you have a frustrated new user.

I regularly use a piece of software from IBM that has (this won't surprise you) an awful UI. There are not one but TWO hamburger menus, hidden amongst a bunch of text menu headings, and figuring out where the one you want is can be noticeably taxing. Explaining to another user where to click is even worse - "No, not that one, the one under the... to the right..."

> but just that it takes longer (even a tiny bit) for most users to visually assess what it means

Also as an example, three horizontal lines also sometimes get used as grips to indicate an element can be click-dragged around. It is less common than it used to be, though.

My problem with it mostly that it hides functionality. Seeing a hamburger menu gives you no insight as to what options exist under it.

The menu itself also tends to be a "grab bag" of multiple otherwise unconnected things, increasing the effort required to figure out how to do something.

I like to refer to them as junk drawers due to their messy nature.

Apps with hamburger menus also tend to have navigation that’s otherwise not well though out, think burying options in chains of modals where the paths to those options change whenever the app’s dev decides it wants to push a different feature/metric.

I like the "junk drawer" analogy. It's perfect. IMO if you as an app developer find yourself reaching for a hamburger menu, that's the time to step back and stop adding junk features, especially if you're writing a mobile app or web page. If you can't fit your application's critical functionality in, say, 4 tabs across the bottom of the app, the app is probably trying to do too much.

That’s often the case, but the other common problem is lack of consideration about hierarchy. It’s fine if every function of the app isn’t accessible with a single tap — that’s probably not necessary except for the app’s most pivotal functions, but most things should be able to be used within two taps and almost everything within three, with the paths being logical and predictable.

It’s plenty doable, but like I said it takes some sitting down and planning and perhaps more importantly, design centered around the user and their needs and less around looking pretty in a slideshow or trying herd the user around.

I know it's only anecdotal, but my mom doesn't get it. She's not super interested in her iPad and basically only uses it when she has to or for FaceTime. She'd be the perfect test subject for stress testing UIs and more interfaces than you'd think are doing a pretty poor job of explaining themselves. Not many icons are intuitive, hiding something in modal windows, muscle memory/dexterity and precision are all problem areas.

The hamburger is basically all of that rolled into one button. It's pretty abstract, you never know what's behind it and when they get fancy with animations and swipe gestures, it's almost always a failure.

I know it's a convenient way to clean up a screen, but the content in that menu needs to be absolutely optional for it to work.

Because when I eat a hamburger, there isn't a whole restaurant inside it.

Nothing about the food suggests its function. And the function varies, it might be a whole rabbit-warren of menus and options. It might be a bunch of actions. It might just be one last item that wouldn't fit on the screen. It's an awful graphic for an awful concept. "We ran out of UI ideas so we just shoveled what was left into this junk drawer" is no way to go through life.

As someone that has been learning new interfaces for the past 50-ish years as they randomly appear and mutate... I had no real idea what the icon might mean. Something that is stacked up that might drop down if I touch it? Could the lines mean a text document of some kind? Could it be a list of things? I got there eventually, but the word "menu" wouldn't have required any guessing on my part, for example. It was easier, though, than figuring out that the three vertical lines at the bottom of my android phone meant switch apps or that the rounded square meant "make the app go away, but don't kill it".

Even the palm pilot with its ridiculously tiny screen and bad touch ditigizer managed CUA-style menus.

Mobile UI design isn't about making things more understandable, it's about getting the user into a helpless and suggestible state so your ad impressions are worth more.

More than anything hamburger menu type design feels to me like an “avoid effort and skill as much as possible” sort of thing more than it does an “optimize ad revenue” sort of thing, as does flat design. It’s about lowering the bar for what’s acceptable to ship as far as you can possibly get away with. Plaster some scrolling flat rounded rectangles and a hamburger menu on the screen and boom you’ve got an app.

Don't make me think? Don't let me think!

I had to look up "CUA".

Common User Access (CUA) is a standard for user interfaces developed by IBM to provide consistency across operating systems and computer programs.

The Palm menubar wasn't permanently visible, the Palm had as close as you can get to a hamburger menu to reveal it https://kalleboo.com/linked/palm-burger.jpg

I think it's time to let this pet peeve go. :(

It wouldn't be fair to use "MENU", as not everyone speaks English, and regardless, many UIs aesthetically need an icon, so why not have standardized on one?

It's healthy to have decided on an icon, but I agree an ellipsis would've been (and still would be) intuitive too. Maybe designers trying to make their mark will start using ellipses in new designs... who knows.

Replacing the hamburger icon with the word "Menu" wouldn't make anything better. The problem isn't the icon, it's the disorganization.

If the designer wants to encourage super-users and quicker access then splaying out all options is better. If they want "clean and tidy", the icon is better.

Heck, even when I have splayed out all the most-important options across the screen... where do I put the /rest/ of the menu options? in an "other" menu, likely drawn with 3 horizontal lines.

  > it's the disorganization

its true in many cases, those hold-everything menus end up has junk drawers that users have hard time navigating through, especially on mobile screens where not everything is shown at once AND the scroll indicator is by default hidden so its not obvious there are more items below the screen edge

You're assuming that it's an agreed and understood standard, which it really isn't. Tech savvy audiences often don't find it easy to understand that there are lots of people who don't understand things like this.

In terms of using MENU, if your audience is not English speaking then you can, and should, consider adding internationalisation and localisation as an alternative. If you have considered it for your content, it makes sense to consider it for your UI as well.

Judging from the list of languages that have "menu" as a word (with a comparable definition to "menu"), I don't think it's a stretch for people to know what the word "menu" means: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/menu , it's not even originally an English word afterall.

No sorry - an ellipsis is the meatballs menu, not a hamburger. Different things. There’s also the kebab menu (also a different thing) and the fighting corn dogs menu …

This is too much for me now haha.

A restaurant menu contains hamburgers, hotdogs, meatballs. A UI menu is represented by abstract icons of the items contained within a restaurant menu.

Now I am starting to like the hamburger menu after all… perhaps more as satire though. :)

For what it’s worth, ellipsis is the best of the bunch, because it means the same thing as in the written language, and is concise enough to use as a button that suggests what the action does.

And for restaurant websites, “Menu” is often one of the links inside the menu, so that’s certainly confusing.

I'm curious what's cognitively loading about three horizontal bars arranged in a square located in the corner of an app or website.

Screens, somewhat counterintuitively, used to be wider. Because they were not on handheld mobile devices. Then we had the menubar and nested dropdowns, suckerfish, etc. It was an exciting time to see a menu, you were never quite sure what you were going to get - I believe there are positives to learning curves for power users.

But I digress. 三 means 3 in Chinese. It doesn't take cognitive load. Why does a hamburger? I really am curious.

Well, to put it in perspective, consider these three words:

Menu Settings Notepad

If these are actionable buttons, the message is encoded and decoded by viewers.

Three bars means what, exactly? There’s the cognitive load.

> Three bars means what, exactly? There’s the cognitive load.

This was true early on when it was not a common convention, or only used in mobile apps. Now, it is nearly universal, though still not nearly standard enough in placement or presentation.

If we were to redo history, it would've been great to see an expanding menu closely positioned by a top-left logo. Sort of like a Windows Start Menu for each website.

I understand and agree to an extent with common use.

However, it stands that language is more specific and unambiguous—thus better suited to communicate an action.

There’s also the problem of the plethora of OTHER icons which use horizontal bars to cause even more cognitive load.

And then, there are many people who have not learned hamburger menu since childhood, and thus the burden is even greater!

Three bars means... the exact same thing the thousands and thousands of times it's been seen before.

People have no inate understanding of 'menu'. We don't even read short words like that letter by letter, it's read as a block and is far more complex than three bars.

I've seen too many variants of icons for "general" menu. Three bars, three dots, square, square in square, tall rectangle, gear, company logo and probably a few more.

And if we want to focus on just three bars let's not leave out the skeuomorphism trend where three bars meant the "grip" area, something to use to rearrange items or windows.

Well, actually the three bars are now two: the cool kids have replaced hamburger with a sausage roll.

See https://apple.com

For continuity, maybe we should call it the "hot dog" menu.

Three bars means... the exact same thing the thousands and thousands of times it's been seen before.

This is true. It means "exactly the same" where it was used millions of times before it landed on a computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_bar

People spend years specifically learning how to read starting in early childhood. It's expected in the current era that people above a certain age are literate to at least some degree. People usually don't spend years specifically learning how to interpret icons except when they have to in an app or on a sign they run into.

"Menu" has a consistent meaning (a list of items to choose from) which most people can be assumed to know. Icons aren't as easily parsed and take more of a mental load to reason about them. Or just trial and error to figure them out.

I use to know a gamer who used a phone for something like a decade. He got stuck doing something and I had to point out the burger to him. The thing he was looking for was interestingly enough not there. Apparently all websites he used were perfectly usable without knowing the button exists.

In contrast, some people can't not-read something and it being a button is automatically parsed out. Symbols and icons have to be learned which is a more gradual process. The other day I didn't recognize the flower icon for settings.

> The other day I didn't recognize the flower icon for settings.

The what now? When did they stop using gears for settings?

This one looked much more like a flower with elongated elliptical teeth lacking space between them.

Pretty much this...

https://www.dreamstime.com/daisy-flower-outline-icon-white-f...

I'm still considering stealing the idea. If you put a daisy in the top corner others will get to experience the same.

Ah yes, this...

https://www.dreamstime.com/white-daisy-chamomile-smiling-fac...

I'm onto something here...

https://www.vecteezy.com/png/11017932-cute-burger-cartoon-il...

"Also, it used to be important when screens were nowhere near as wide but now there’s no longer any reason to use it the way it is."

Mobile users?

There is more than enough room for 4 menus across the top of a typical mobile device. If you expect the user to need to access it regularly, you could even put it across the bottom. This is why the homescreen on most phones has 4 items across the bottom; not a single hamburger menu with "Phone, Messages, Web, ..."

Hamburger is pretty bad, but we adjust if the pattern is repeated enough.

Which means we can also adjust to a waaaay better alternative to the hamburger menu (but i dont know what that is rn).

The article points out the solution: the word "MENU".

Absolutely just use the word "MENU" instead, if the button's already in a textual interface. And if not, labeling the hamburger is almost always better than leaving it naked. But I think there are better overall solutions to be found outside of the local maximum, if you will.

Great if you are an English speaker. Do we then translate that to every language we need to support? Do we scale the UI to work for the different length words?

I dont think that is any better at all. If anything I think its solidly worse.

Menu seems to be the kind of word that pops up in a lot of languages.

Some with extra letters, or accents, or fonts entirely. Other languages share the concept but the word is completely different.

μενού, valikko, roghchlár, メニュー , مِنو, меню́, trình đơn

To pick a few.

So translate it. Unless your app is so simple that it has no other text labels anywhere, you're going to need to need translations anyway.

Ideally, the translation needs to happen before the UI design. I've seen a lot of UI designs come straight from the designer with a beautiful pixel-perfect depiction of controls, but assuming English. So the "MENU" button was designed deliberately such that exactly four latin characters fit inside of it horizontally. Or assuming people's names fit in one line of text, or addresses have a certain number of lines and so on. Then when you get around to translating everything, the design has to go back to the drawing board.

> Great if you are an English speaker. Do we then translate that to every language we need to support?

Yes.

If the page isn't in the target language of the person using it, what difference does it make whether or not it says "menu" in English? If the user wouldn't be able to understand the contents of the menu, is it markedly better that they access those options via a hamburger icon vs an inscrutable bit of text?

It still hasn't entered the lexicon of normal folk and has me going NO THE THREE LINES / THREE DOTS in X CORNER quite often. Too bad it's not four.

There's a special place in Hell for those who put hamburger menus in desktop apps, Jetbrains.

That Newsweek one would have had me stumped for a little, I think. I like to think I'm pretty tech-savvy, but not knowing Newsweek, that looks a little bit like a logo to me. I think I would assume that was going to take me to the homepage and avoid it.

For people mentioning the need for translations, clicking the button, regardless of label or not will usually show... text. that needs translations. only one more word for a label.

There is a balance to be struck between accessibility (speed sense) and discoverability, which disfavor hamburgers, and cognitive load minimization, which favors hamburgers, if you reserve it for lesser-used items. Perhaps a themed menu icon that indicates what it holds would be better.

Waitasec, you mean we could give icons different shapes to indicate what they do?

The patent for the "start here" menu expired a decade ago. We can just call it the "start here" button.

https://patents.google.com/patent/DE69523543D1/

Huh, interesting research. I wonder how much more intuitive the firefox hamburger menu on the top right would be if they moved it to the left. I sadly just realized it's the one icon I cannot customize the location of, but now I'm super curious.

Their first attempt at a unique menu button was on the left (circa Firefox 4-5).

https://static.digit.in/fckeditor/uploads/ff4-newui.png

But they probably figured that the more like Chrome they are, the better...

God, every time I see a screenshot of Firefox 4 I get hit with a nostalgia blast. I was in highschool and I remember getting hyped up about the UI overhaul from teasers Mozilla was putting out. Felt like Christmas when I hooked up to the dorm wifi at the table in the lounge and got the update notification.

I always said Hamburger is an excuse for a lazy designer :-) Take it with a pinch of salt.

I always use em because I'm the laziest type of designer: a dev

thought i’d make a hamburger menu for https://harcstack.org … here’s the story https://rakujourney.wordpress.com/2025/06/08/harc-stack-hamb...

since this is raku driven i’ve been leaning into unicode for the hamburger icon and leaning out from font awesome

quite hard to find a suitable unicode glyph though

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a hamburger button on the top left. Usually top right… or am I hallucinating?

I remember when Windows Phone started using the hamburguer flow instead of their original UI design, what a loss in usability and creativity.

For a site about usability this mobile design is awful. Why would I want to permanently cover part of a mobile screen while reading an article!!

As here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182509

When will Windows replace the start menu with a hamburger? When will Apple replace the Apple menu with a hamburger?

Using the product or vendor logo as a menu icon on desktop is its own trope. The Apple menu and the Start menu aren't even the same kind of menu, nor do they function the same as "hamburger" app or website navigation on mobile.

> The Apple menu and the Start menu aren't even the same kind of menu

My experience has been that no two hamburger menus are the same kind of menu, either.

Was it ever? I honestly think you could have used almost any icon, given the limited screen real estate, and the tendency to put menu buttons at the corners of the interface.

I think we spend too much time pondering "semiotics" when we should just consider the _basic_ "ergonomics."

I recently had someone refer to the app menu in google as a “waffle” and I laughed but also… why not!

lol “why are menus represented by hamburgers, kebabs, meatballs” … “beats me. They’re food and you usually have food on a menu?”

My assumption is some designer chose the three horizontal lines to suggest a list of choices. Later, for some tiny space where lines didn't fit well, they were crushed into three dots stacked vertically (which also sort of suggests an ellipsis tipped on its side?) Why we decided to use food metaphors... well, who isn't thinking about what's for lunch?

> which also sort of suggests an ellipsis tipped on its side

They're bullet points indicating a list of items.

Meat. Balls.

That's exactly it. Android popularized it with its early versions when those phones had physical buttons. One of those buttons was the menu list button which opened the context menu. Eventually that button was removed and was replaced with in-app menu buttons. The remaining buttons became virtual, and then bikeshedded to triangle, circle, and square because usability be damned.

I did not read the article and only half of the comments. I would put a flag for the language’s where the pancake menu was that opens full screen menu to choose the language you want.

Which means I would then have the whole site in one happy scrolling page on mobile. Did the article or the second half of the comments address solutions?

- or, how would you do it without nav except for the footer links …

Mobile German navigation sucks because of the long words when implementing, yes.

Great work by NN/group documenting examples in the wild and providing clear suggestions.

It's amazing just how bad UI/UX professionals are (often due to backgrounds in graphic design instead of human computer interaction). Making changes as small as putting an outline around the hamburger menu (makes it looks like a document) or putting dots in front of the lines (makes it look like a button to add bullets) makes the icon unrecognizable/confusing.

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