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Comment by bilekas | Hacker News Reader

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..

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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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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