> I like the sausage link concept because it clearly labels options with text.
100%. I'm kinda surprised how the 3 lines hamburger menu got so prevalent in the first place, because it always user tests poorly. My guess is that when flat minimalism (my favorite shitty example of this is when Android expected everyone to know what a flat square, circle and triangle are supposed to mean) was the rage, even though user testing always showed a ton of people didn't know what the three lines meant, that designers felt it would eventually become "the standard" and people would know.
Problem is, years later, tons of people still don't know what it means - every time we do user testing, words do better. I think these days design fads change so frequently that there really isn't enough time for any design to be that "standard" long enough for everyone to really grasp it.
The hamburger menu on the web is what the touch screen are for cars. You can fit anything on there, no matter what the future might hold. No need to think about your content too hard.
And in fact the designer is really not supposed to think about the content too hard. It's not how we do web. This is how we do: There's a CMS and you can add and remove items. How many? As many as the client later discovers they want.
It makes sense, kinda. It solves issues for different parties that are involved in the process. Like with touch screens in cars, we get something for what we give and it might just be the best we can reasonably do given constraints.
> The hamburger menu on the web is what the touch screen are for cars.
I thought this was a brilliant analogy. But you don't seem to have meant it.
> Like with touch screens in cars, we get something for what we give and it might just be the best we can reasonably do given constraints.
Touchscreens in cars are a huge step back from what we had in the 80s. They're far more despised than the hamburger menu. Complaints about the hamburger menu generally take a tone of disgruntled resignation. Complaints about car touchscreens are burning outrage.
There is no way touchscreens in cars can be the best we can do given constraints, because they're much worse than what they replaced.
> There is no way touchscreens in cars can be the best we can do given constraints, because they're much worse than what they replaced.
It is not about how poorly touchscreens perform against what they replace, but what they enable: A continuously developed car, built around software (updates).
"Modern" design is so opposed to any skeuomorphism that every item on the screen has been totally drained of color and detail. So many UIs are frustrating to use because everything is an abstract monochrome glyph. The extreme of fashion over function we're suffering right now is mind-boggling.
In the early 2000's we had books like Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think"; but now, for some reason, decades of design and engineering knowledge are being totally ignored, to society's great detriment.
I wonder if those books are ever read nowadays or if the sheer number of projects requiring design skills led to uneducated masses of coders or whatever (me too) doing the job of real educated designers. And fashion, and Bootstrap and all those time saving toolkits.
I take the 3 lines to mean "click/press here for a list of something". Perhaps because people called it a hamburger, that created some extra mental friction, contributing to the confusion/hate?
Not quite, the usage of lines are still conveying something, it's similar to pause, play, stop on media players, it's similar to back, forward and refresh icons on the browser. Line based symbols are easy to pick up and have been picked up by users from our testing, I'm really not sure what studies you're referring to (?)
For an actual shitty example, look at Macos window button controls. Red yellow and green circles, they convey absolutely nothing, you're expected to learn them. Instead of slating this shitty design, everyone just rolls over and learns them.
I think you're either unaware or ignoring that, in both of those cases, there was precedent that people were already familiar with when those icons came out. Pause, play, and stop, for example, were found on nearly any media/cassette/tape player and served as simple indicators of the direction the tape/spool was going. The arrow to left meant the reel was spinning backwards because the tape moved to the left, the square meant stop because the reel didn't move at all, and the play icon meant that the reel was moving to the right. Add in double arrows to denote speed. Add a line at the far left/far right to indicate beginning/end.
The hamburger has no such lineage. It started as a menu icon and changed slightly but no one had any idea what even the initial icon meant without an explanation that it's a list.
The hamburger menu represents a list of items. It's symbolic, but at least a direct representation of the outcome the user wants.
The play and stop icons were icons that describe an operation of a machine that will then indirectly produce the outcome the user wants. They require the user to know how the machine functions. No one thinks "I would like the tape to move to the right" or "I would like the music to stop, which means the tape needs to stop moving, which means stopping the spools, which means selecting the least circular shape".
>They require the user to know how the machine functions.
No, they don't. That's why they worked so well and was my entire point. All people needed to know was that they wanted to go forward, backward, or stop movement in whatever music or video was playing and that's a clear metaphorical and symbolical link. Someone with no knowledge of the function could walk up to a tape recorder and infer what the symbols meant in relation to what was happening.
The hamburger menu is not even intuitively a list and there's no connection that a user presented with it would recognize it as a call for a menu/list. There are plenty of user studies that confirm this.
> I'm really not sure what studies you're referring to (?)
We did multiple usability studies over years for a company I worked at that built a very popular mobile app. The tests were standard usability test format, where we'd ask a user to complete a task and then just say "go" and figure it out. Times where the user had to find something in the hamburger menu, when we replaced the 3 lines with words like "MENU" or "MORE" always tested better.
Designers pretty much universally hated the text version, and I do appreciate the localization challenges, but the results weren't ambiguous.
Designers like the hamburger because it lets them sweep anything they haven't considered under the rug. They're simple so no one attempts to cram in carousels or videos or what have you, so its the easiest way to add functionality into an app that doesn't have any other thought put into expanding the navigation. So in that sense they're highly productive.
> Designers like the hamburger because it lets them sweep anything they haven't considered under the rug.
Aren't you just describing all collapsible menus? I thought the complaint about the hamburger menu was specifically that the icon is unclear. It seems odd to disparage all collapsible menus, particularly on mobile where it's very easy to have a small number of reasonable menu options with no way to possible fit them onto the screen without a way to collapse them.
This is one of the things I dislike most about hamburger menus: they're effectively junk drawers than can contain anything and everything and are painful to try to search through.
Just about every prior type of navigation is better.
I design and I don't like them, but clients insist on them against my advice over and over. Clients routinely take informative sites and want to pare it back to minimal information, because they don't like having to write text or maintain anything. Or hide navigation because it feels like cleaning up. You'd be amazed at the ridiculous things they insist on even when there is logical or industry best/decent-practice suggesting otherwise. It's very frustrating.
Flat minimalism (compared to using words) is popular because you don't need to have translations of square, circle, and triangle into foreign languages.
(Square, circle, and triangle is also the old Electronic Arts logo, but that's probably not the reason.)
> my favorite shitty example of this is when Android expected everyone to know what a flat square, circle and triangle are supposed to mean
What is this referring to?
Edit: I'm so used to these buttons that I didn't even realize they were just simple flat shapes. It definitely would be confusing for someone new to Android or for someone who's not good with tech.
In Android[0], the "back" button on the bottom is a triangle pointing left. The "home" button is a circle. The "show recent apps" button is a square. All are just flat shapes.
Completely unintuitive to anybody that's never used Android before.
Contrast that to the early days of Android where the Back button was a curved arrow, the Home button was an icon of a house, and the Menu button was the hamburger menu people are familiar with, except the lines were thinner.
[0] This may actually vary depending on what phone you have and if the maker changes these, but on my Pixel 6, this is the description.
Back symbol pointing left is probably less intuitive if your language isn't left to right oriented. Wonder if back symbols or back animations have ever been "localized" to orient based on the language used.
Android sort of gets a pass in that it's something that's constantly used by the user, so there's some ability to train people into arbitrary and unclear UXes, especially if they're only a few buttons (a good example is game controllers where what buttons do is completely disconnected from the letter or symbol they're assigned).
iOS is pretty similar in that a good number of the navigation gestures aren't super intuitive and not really discoverable until you build some muscle memory.
I believe the navigation buttons on the bottom. I see no issue with them, since it's easy to associate the left triangle with back, the circle with something that affects everything and the square with something else which does something which is obvious once you tap it.
Where is this from? Some sort of skin? I don't have a square at all on my Android phone, a Google Pixel (which I assume is "base" Android). You see recent apps by sliding up.
Also the triangle is only an arrow on my phone and the circle is an oval.
It's configurable in Android settings. I think you must have "2 button navigation" option selected? The default is (or used to be) 3 button and looks like the screenshot above, as far as I'm aware
> Problem is, years later, tons of people still don't know what it means
This is a problem which could get solved if every mainstream media presents this icon for 30 seconds with a short explanation for one week during the main news hour. Or every newspaper would dedicate 1/4 of a page to it for one week.
Viewers educated, problem solved. Make an exception for such an important icon.
I personally find the sausage link horrible. I have to scroll by picking the scroll bar with the mouse because the scroll wheel is not working in the demo, and it's anything but a compact display of information, unlike what you get with a drop-down popup menu.
100%. I'm kinda surprised how the 3 lines hamburger menu got so prevalent in the first place, because it always user tests poorly. My guess is that when flat minimalism (my favorite shitty example of this is when Android expected everyone to know what a flat square, circle and triangle are supposed to mean) was the rage, even though user testing always showed a ton of people didn't know what the three lines meant, that designers felt it would eventually become "the standard" and people would know.
Problem is, years later, tons of people still don't know what it means - every time we do user testing, words do better. I think these days design fads change so frequently that there really isn't enough time for any design to be that "standard" long enough for everyone to really grasp it.