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Comment by derwildemomo | Hacker News Reader

Actually, the original article the tc-story summarizes is at http://lmjabreu.com/post/why-and-how-to-avoid-hamburger-menu... .

And while I'm not a big fan of hamburgers as well, proposing a scrollable tab bar as an alternative is.. a bit strange.

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From my experience, scrollable tab bars can be nice – but that is if the user actually knows that the bar can be scrolled. For example, in VSCOcam (image editing app) I discovered that the tab bar can be swiped/scrolled after two months of using the app, by accident. After showing this to a few other people, I can say that most of them didn't know that either. The fact that the part of the tab that was displayed by default already seemed to have enough options/tools also played a role, I guess.

And in the Twitter, they have this thing that from the timeline you can swipe to "Discover", and it's only shown by a small set of "pagination" circles on top – there's no explicit mention of this, and the circles are kind of easy to miss.

I think you'd have an exceptionally difficult time getting users to enjoy a scrollable tab bar. I've already had enough trouble getting the iOS menu to pull up from the bottom of the screen; can't imagine having to deal with the same for a tab bar in an app.

I'm so glad I wasn't the only one! I used VSCO for months before I found that it has far more editing options than just the 4/5 shown at first.

Good call. Its all about a battle for space and I'm not so sure either solves it. I'm a fan of gesture-based navigation/menus, but the learning curve is pretty steep there.

The original post makes a good point that, paraphrased, it's about improving a flawed information architecture instead of trying to fix symptoms, like the hamburger menu. And though it's tempting to use esoteric, hard-to-use/understand gestures and interaction models, it's almost never the right way. It's that subtle difference between an interface that feels like it's been designed to 'feel smart', instead of something that's easy to use.

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