[matchbok]

Why do sites continue to use the hamburger menu??? (and also hide the menu if we don't decide to allocate 1200px of real estate to basically empty website!?)

Such a bad UX for discoverability.

Here's what I see:

https://imgur.com/a/COfKBYM

[pragone]

I'm confused - what's the problem with the hamburger menu? What would the alternative be on small screens?

[alehul]

Would have to search to find the exact studies, but it's been found that a hamburger menu will lower engagement and result in shorter user sessions (particularly, the user will visit less pages). The intuitive answer as to why is that you're burying a very important navigation menu by making it an extra click away (and hidden from view by default).

Anecdotal side note, but when I was working on a startup in some industry, we found that our largest competitor by an order of magnitude had a navigation bar at the bottom in their mobile app, while everyone else in the space used the hamburger menu. The experience made it seem like this is common knowledge at the higher levels of app design.

Even Apple has come out and explicitly spoken against the hamburger menu as a design element for iOS apps, and instead recommends tab bars.

[matchbok]

It seems to trigger even on non-mobile devices. If I shrink my viewport to a normal width (900ish pixels) the entire site is basically unusable. :/

[baddox]

Most modern responsive design doesn't specifically target mobile vs. non-mobile devices, but rather simply the width of the browser window. In my experience a width of 900px is generally considered pretty low for a desktop browser, and toward the high end for tablets and large smartphone.

Bootstrap, for instance, uses 992px as the low end of its "large" media query, which is intended for desktops.

[mdorazio]

900px is not normal - that's tiny by today's standards. The only plausible alternative at a width that small would be to shrink the size of the text in the menu, otherwise it simply won't fit. Doing that would be worse to me for usability than switching to the hamburger.

[runako]

> 900px is not normal - that's tiny by today's standards.

Wait what? That's tiny for a screen, but not for a (resizable!) browser window. Here's a shout-out for folks like me who run browser windows side-by-side.

[mdorazio]

Side-by-side windows are simply not used by normal users, which the vast majority of websites are designed for. The real question here is why don't you have a second monitor?

[huebomont]

uhh most users don't have a second monitor. and you don't just design for "most." quite a lazy mindset around here.

[matchbok]

Sorry I don't think you're correct here. There is a ton of wasted space here.

https://imgur.com/a/COfKBYM

Definitely room for an actual menu there.

Either way, a hidden hamburger menu makes 0 sense on a desktop environment anyway, no matter how much space you have.

[mdorazio]

And I don't think you're correct. There are 5 menu items + log in + the API docs button on the main header. If you want all those to fit in a sub-standard width page, you're going to end up sacrificing readability in text. If you want to propose removing a menu item to make more space, that's an option, but just saying "I don't like the hamburger - they could fit the menu somehow" is not helpful.

[huebomont]

What you do is fit the important stuff and hide the rest under a "more..." just because it ALL can't fit doesn't mean hiding everything is the only solution.

[liveoneggs]

since I don't use facebook I didn't know you were supposed to click on them until I started seeing articles about how bad they were. It opened a whole new world of menus.

[koube]

Don't know if it's just me, but the hamburger menu doesn't even work on chrome + macOS. I click it and nothing happens.

[graedus]

Same with Chrome and Firefox in Win10. Even Chrome's device/touch emulation doesn't work. It does work on iOS Safari. Can't say I've seen such weird event handling in a while.

[frereubu]

Same on macOS + Firefox

[culot]

I do know that is the default for many popular Wordpress themes. The hamburger break-point is usually too generous. It looks like its just a poor use of spacing that leads to premature hamburgerization:

https://i.imgur.com/kTid0y3.png