Hamburger icon: How these three lines mystify most people | Hacker News Reader

Hamburger icon: How these three lines mystify most people

bbc.co.uk

23 pointsopium_tea17 comments

It would really be great if people stop calling it the "Hamburger" icon, and just dub it as the "Menu" icon.

When I ask someone (who is not clued into UX discussions, e.g. my parents) to look for the "Hamburger" icon, they expect to find a literal hamburger shape. Ask them to look for "three or four parallel lines", and they find it faster. I've then asked them to learn is as the "Menu" button, and that seems to stick. Otherwise, it is GOTO START ;) !

So designers everywhere, please change this horrible name and use a more easy to grok name.

oh. I though it meant "settings" and every time I see both the hamburger icon (that we're discussing) and the gears icon (a common icon for settings, preferences, configuration) I get confused as to how I'm supposed to guess where you've put what I want.

Just click around until you find what you need. You even get to know the entire app if you do that. You're not going to blast a nuke or kill someone by clicking, after all.

There's often no, or poorly implemented, undo on mobile so you risk data loss or mass-communicating something wanted to keep private or screwing up some setting and no way to retrieve it.

And it's not just "click the visible elements until you achieve the disired result", it's touch visible and invisible elements, combined with all the differen touch-gestures you know, in the hope that you'll get what you want, but possibly not.

This is actually how I always pictured the technology of the future. (Same as when I think about the interface from Minority Report - i.e. Tom Cruise is just gesturing around aimlessly, not able to actually do what he's trying to.)

Who would have thought that when it came to mobile tech, we actually WOULDN'T have figured it out! Just click around and hope you don't destroy anything. It actually is just like it looks in scifi films :)

Someone needs to redub that Minority Report scene with error messages and frustrated tom cruise unable to achieve anything.

Or the star trek computer mis-hearing what everyone says.

I would dare to say those incidents you describe happen because people click mindlessly instead of reading. Clicking around is not clicking mindlesly. You can read what the stuff says. And you, in last case, read the instructions manual. Or maybe that should be the first thing to do and us humans have always been doing things the wrong way.

Reading? Reading what? Look at modern apps like, eg snapchat. What's to read? Snapchat has six icons on the screen. Which one do you tap to get to a help menu? The menu icon? No. The square thing? No. The snapchat ghost? No. Oh, actually, yes, because you also need to click the settings gear icon, and scroll down a whole page and select support.

There isn't anything to read.

There's always something to read. I don't know what else to tell you. I also don't think it's unreasonable to ask someone to learn how to handle a shovel before starting the digging.

This is a dumb statement.

If you want them to find the Menu icon then use a text label like a sane person.

> Putting the hamburger inside a box, so it looks like a button, increases use by 22.4%.

I'm glad to see evidence that shows the extremes of flat designs has stupid ideas.

B-b-but skeumorphism sucks, right guys?..

Sadly Microsoft is in a rush to embrace the 'hamburger menu' in Windows 10 (mobile and otherwise), basically because it's common on the dominant mobile platforms: http://www.windowscentral.com/why-microsoft-hamburger-menus-...

Doesn't it represent a "list"? As in a menu, a list of things..

I Think people would pick up on that more if it had more but thinner lines. Or maybe broke up the lines into something that looked like text.

It's funny to read how differently this icon is interpreted. I always saw it as a menu and could for the longest time not figure out what this hamburger was.

I really like the "equal sign gone wrong"

TIL - people call the menu icon the "hamburger icon". Am I the only one who's never heard of the "hamburger icon"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com