[detritus]

> "Over the last few decades hamburger buttons have become the de facto standard to expand larger menus on smaller devices. They are so ubiquitous that every user immediately knows what they are when seen in the top left or right corner, which makes them a good user interface element choice."

"Last Few Decades"? Eh? A decade.. perhaps?

"Every User Immediately"? This is not at all my experience. Perhaps with younger users, but I've seen plenty of people younger than I even stumble over sites where the nav was hidden behind a hamburger menu icon.

This sounds like it was written by someone very much in their own bubble

[dwringer]

This immediately made me think of Wikipedia's latest change that moves their main menu behind just such a hamburger button on desktop, and replaces it with a table of contents down the left side.

Now instead of lazily clicking from one random article to the next (or to a different language, or to "current events", or the "main page" of headline articles), one has to move the mouse twice and make two clicks to get to it through the hamburger menu, or use the URL bar. I can't even remember the last time I went back to the ToC when reading a Wikipedia article and this change is utterly incomprehensible to me.

[xchkr1337]

My experience with this is literally the opposite, I almost never clicked the buttons on the left side (except for the language switcher but that isn't in the hamburger menu now) but I always found long tables of contents very annoying on bigger articles, I find the new design generally more comfortable to read with. The only complaint I have is that it doesn't remember the state of the fullscreen button.

[marginalia_nu]

Yeah on desktop it's particularly bizarre design choice. Hamburger buttons are designed to conserve pixels on cramped horizontal screens. They make zero sense on a 4k ultrawide monitor.

[mgkimsal]

likely a case of wanting "one design to fit all devices".

[wolpoli]

Unfortunately for power users, "one design to fit all devices" is done by designing for mobile first. Desktop is treated as a giant tablet. Hence the large buttons and huge distance between elements.

[joshspankit]

It’s greatly complicated by how widely variable modern monitors are. Web designers can no longer target px or vw for width and space between elements unless the set a maximum width for the content.

[eyelidlessness]

I don’t share OP’s gripes with the changes to Wikipedia’s UI, but there are approaches to responsive design (which one might phrase “one design to fit all devices”) that don’t arbitrarily hide useful stuff in a menu where there’s space to accommodate it. And those approaches have only gotten more capable in recent years.

The problem, if there is one, is information hierarchy and deciding whether/how/where to disclose a given information at a given level in that hierarchy and how it’s disclosed. It’s very situationally dependent and probably impossible to please everyone. Optimizing it for the best outcomes for most users is what most good designs do, and they very seldom do the things a lot of vocal HN complaints want (shove everything on screen close together with small text, ie optimize for desktop power users; or make everything infinitely configurable, ie optimize for… idk even what the optimization serves, the same users complain about the web being overly complicated).

[marginalia_nu]

That's a pipe dream if I ever saw one. Desktop and mobile inputs have entirely different properties and constraints.

[Spivak]

And "one design to fit not maximized windows on not high-dpi screens."

The new design vs the old design.

https://imgur.com/a/rV1UXc4

[dwringer]

Thanks for that great perspective, I can absolutely see the benefit of the new design in a cramped display or at lower resolutions. OTOH, the comparison at 4k is strikingly different.

[marginalia_nu]

The old wikipedia design predates consumer access to 4K monitors though.

The reason the text wasn't wider is because long lines of text are hard to read. It's why newspapers typically arrange their text into columns, rather than having one article being 2-3 lines long stretching across the entire page.

[deathanatos]

And yet it feels like all designers are doing this. Some Rust docs, rendered by mdBook, was annoying me just yesterday with this.

(It's perhaps worse in that way, since it's the tooling generating the HTML, of course, so this is just going to propagate…)

[notRobot]

Wikipedia has support for different skins, including the old one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34431533

[johannes1234321]

> I can't even remember the last time I went back to the ToC when reading a Wikipedia article

I can't remember going purposely back to the ToC myself, however I often enough scroll over pages to find a section again and there it helps to have the structure visible.

However the nice thing: In your preferences you can pick the style you like. So if you want the old one pick it.

You can also leave feedback with them that "random page" is important (I like that one too!) so they find a better place ...

[layer8]

Another thing I dislike about the new design is the visual distraction of the current section being highlighted in the TOC. When you scroll through an article, you have like a blinking light moving through the TOC.

[awefji]

I'm fine with it on articles, where as you say there's a table of contents.

But the front page just has empty space there?!!??

[reaperducer]

"Every User Immediately"? This is not at all my experience. Perhaps with younger users

I agree.

I put a hamburger menu in an in-house tool I built last year. Everyone in that department is between 22 and 30, with one guy over 50. I always stand with the users when my new products are deployed, so I was in the room when nobody recognized what the hamburger menu was.

I ended up changing it to the word "Menu" and everyone was happy.

I think it's becoming even more confusing now that Google is pushing the ⋮ vertical ellipsis as a hamburger replacement. The last thing the web needs is inconsistent icons.

[runarberg]

Iconography is both art and science, just like typography, and works hand in hand with usability. The right icon in the right context will convey its meaning to the users, if it doesn’t then it is not the right icon or the context is missing (or both). What makes the right icon has to do with both universality and internal consistency, but neither is required.

Universally consistent icons only exist in rare cases, most of the time it is because a certain industry sits down and agrees on a standard (the power buttons are a good example; or the radioactivity and bio-hazard symbols), so inconsistent icons across the web is simply a reality that we have to live with as web designers. This makes our work both harder, but also more interesting.

I think you made the right choice removing the icon with text. Sometimes there is no icon which fits the context to provide meaning to it. In those cases, text is the correct choice.

[autoexec]

I don't care much for hamburger menus but the vertical ellipsis drives me nuts. The standard icon represents a list of lines of text. What the hell is a list of dots supposed to signify?

[unsupp0rted]

Every time I think something is obvious and ubiquitously understood someone on my client's team looks directly at it and insists it doesn't exist, or if it exists then it doesn't do anything, or if it does something then what it does isn't the thing they thought it would do.

[irrational]

I remember a business manager having zero idea that clicking the logo at the top of a webpage would often take you to the home page. I had assumed this was ubiquitously understood, but clearly not.

[at-fates-hands]

>> I had assumed this was ubiquitously understood, but clearly not.

Some anecdotal evidence to support this.

I work for a very large health care company. We recently redesigned one of our portals. During the UX research phase, one of the tasks was to go back to the home page via the logo - one of the researchers had an idea we were assuming all of our users should/would know this since but we still have a large portion of our users are older, retirees or aging Gen Xers. It was a hunch at the time - nothing more.

The research showed a large enough percentage of people couldn't complete the task in a timely manner whereas on the new design, the logo is now just an SVG, with no link. We have a dedicated "Home" link now on the main navigation which in testing, 100% of the people were now able to complete the task in a timely manner.

I think it really stunned quite a few people since this has seemingly been a standard design pattern for so long. I was pretty stunned hearing the research team talking about it.

[irrational]

Frankly, I would think the Gen X people would be the most familiar with the pattern. I'm Gen X and I grew up with computers from the Commodore 64 to modern computers. I learned about the clicking the logo to go to the home page back in the mid-90s, even before I became a web developer myself. It was my generation that came up with that design pattern.

[dalmo3]

> the logo is now just an SVG, with no link.

Why not both? Genuine question.

[unsupp0rted]

It seems people don't explore at all. There's no "I wonder what would happen if" impulse, or there's an "I'd better not just in case" worry.

[djbusby]

And the lack of tooltips on hover. WTF, it's missing on loads of big properties.

[autoexec]

Mobile platforms are the worst when it comes to having any understanding at all over where a link (or linked element) will take you and I don't think that's unintentional.

[a9h74j]

Jef Raskin: "Intuitive" == familiar.

User never used/discovered it before == not familiar.

[dvh]

The only intuitive user interface is a nipple. Everything else has to be learned.

[intrasight]

The original "3-D user-friendly input device" ;)

[reaperducer]

I presume you're being down-voted for the use of the word "nipple," by people who don't know that this is an axiom that has been used in the design industry for a very long time.

[Domenic_S]

It's a fun little meme, but it's not all that accurate. Something like half of mothers report latching or other nipple-baby interface problems in some studies [0]. What's more, suckling is a hardwired reflex, not something that's intuited, so the quote also misunderstands the nature of intuition.

FWIW I also used to use that quote, until I had a child and saw firsthand [well, second-hand as it was my wife doing the work] how much effort breastfeeding a newborn could take; I don't really blame anyone for quoting it (it's pithy after all).

Surprisingly good further discussion on the UX SE [1].

0: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/09/23/2253491...

1: https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/5150/is-it-true-that-...

[thaumasiotes]

> What's more, suckling is a hardwired reflex, not something that's intuited

The fact that suckling is a hardwired reflex is what makes using the nipple intuitive. You use it by doing the same thing you think you should do.

[autoexec]

> The fact that suckling is a hardwired reflex is what makes using the nipple intuitive. You use it by doing the same thing you think you should do.

In this case it gets used automatically without choice or thought. Anything shoved into a baby's mouth triggers it. It's not intuition, just reflex. Intuition implies understanding.

It's the difference between "I know that what this is for and how to use it" vs "I have no idea what this is and I have no control over doing it, this is just something that is happening to me"

[thaumasiotes]

> Intuition implies understanding.

No, if anything it's the opposite. If you understand something, you'll find it easy to use. Intuition is what you rely on in the absence of understanding.

[reaperducer]

Because not every baby figures it out the first time does not mean it is not intuitive for the other babies that do figure it out immediately.

It's become more of a meme to be needlessly contrarian, and ignore the fact that billions of babies actually do know this interface intuitively.

[Domenic_S]

Ironically in your haste to be contrarian to me, you failed to read the statistics. Billions of babies do know intuitively and billions more don’t. The meme is actually pretty harmful for new parents, who may think their child must be defective if they can’t figure out “the only intuitive interface”, when the reality is that it’s extremely common.

But beyond that (and this is covered in the stack overflow thread) is that it confuses intuition and reflex. Reflex is hard-wired and the stimulus often doesn’t even hit the brain - think a doctor tapping a kneecap. Suckling is like this, which is why a baby will root if you stroke its cheek - obviously there’s no nipple on the finger, yet the baby’s reflex kicks in nonetheless.

Intuition/intuitive on the other hand, in the context of UI design, means the user can without thinking or with very little conscious thought understand how to use the interface.

[mixmastamyk]

Also many times they “know” what to do but can’t quite succeed for whatever reason. Or perhaps the milk is not ready.

[PoignardAzur]

Nope, I downvoted because I don't like it when HN users quote platitudes with no additional context or elaboration to shut down a discussion which is more interesting than the one-line platitude.

It's like quoting Einstein's bit about infinite stupidity, or the Dunning Kruger effect. It's dismissive without being insightful.

[eyelidlessness]

I like the platitude but I upvoted you anyway because I agree with you that it shouldn’t be used to curtail discussion.

[divbzero]

Could we popularize an alternative to hamburger buttons that is more discoverable for users?

Google uses a horizontally-scrolling menu bar for Images, News, etc., just above the search results when viewed on mobile: https://www.google.com/search?q=test

The horizontally-scrolling menu bar seems to be:

– Discoverable for typical visual browsers

– Discoverable for screen readers, especially when used with attributes like role="menu" and role="menuitem"

– Fully functional without JavaScript

[moffkalast]

They even wrote the following:

> Put yourself in the shoes of a visually impaired person and think how frustrating it must be to get on a page that doesn’t allow you to open the main menu!

I just have to laugh at that kind of level of delusion. As if a screen reader will be able to figure out what the menu button is when the ids, classes and tags are all filled up with generated garbage by <insert unnecessary framework of choice>. It's not like the icon is labelled in any way that matters.

Any actually accessible or even good UX would have the menu buttons expanded by default, with text and not just icons. Mobile UIs have brought on this epidemic of hiding all features behind multiple superfluous clicks of icons hidden somewhere to the side and it just makes me feel like throwing up seeing it on desktop UIs. Even Wikipedia did it recently, despite the community backlash.

[micahdeath]

As someone with less dexterity, I agree.

I also use 1440x900 on 24 inch monitors (I'm on the screen for 14 hours a day and don't like eye fatigue.) (1280x720 on 15 inch laptops -- most sites think I'm on mobile so even more clicks)

[enyo]

The icon was designed and introduced in 1981. The popularity dramatically increased in the last decade due to smartphones that’s for sure.

It’s used by Microsoft, Apple, Youtube... the list goes on. I think it’s not too much of a stretch to say that it is ubiquitous and familiar to users.

That being said, it's not the point of the article. There are definitely reasons not to use a hamburger button. But this article helps you build one if you want it.

[detritus]

I know it was originally invented way back when (in Xerox Parc?), but it did not become 'de facto' on small screens decades ago, that's just a mangling of perspective.

I don't recollect ever having seen it on any of the 'small screens' (ie LCDs, etc) I used prior to smartphones.

[mixmastamyk]

PDAs and the Nokia phone, mp3 player generation had icons. 90s-2010s

[anthk]

PDA's where niche. No one used hamburger buttons prior to 2007-2010. No. One. Period.

[mixmastamyk]

The wikipedia article linked elsewhere disproves that.

However I misread the thread in my previous post.

[anthk]

Our actual experience say otherwise instead of your review of 90's history on Wikipedia and alikes.

PDA's where a CEO/mid-boss/rich guy tools and nothing more, ditto with cell phones until late 90's.

The 99% of the people using software was doing that thru PC's and with a mouse and menu based WIMP interfaces, and not a smartphone based UI.

[enyo]

I never said that it did.

[detritus]

Except in the bit I quoted above, no.

Wait, what?

This might seem like I'm simply being contrarian or wanting stamp my rightitude on the matter, but your framing of the icon's absolute comprehension by everyone else seems to me to be ... ill-advised. Someone not doing their homework might just take your schpiel at face value and propagate problems obliviously.

I've 'beta'd' hamburger icons a few times over the years and have always come away not relying on them precisely because they don't seem to have the blanket comprehension amongst users you seem to think they do.

[enyo]

> "but it did not become 'de facto' on small screens decades ago”

To me saying that something becomes something over a few decades doesn’t imply that it has been that way from the beginning. It has become a de facto standard over two decades doesn’t mean that it was a de facto standard two decades ago.

I feel like this is really not important, and I’ll change it to the last decade because it doesn’t matter. It’s definitely true that the adoption was most relevant in the last decade. I remember building hamburger menus over 20 years ago though.

What is more important is your second point that I sort of endorse hamburger buttons as a good UI element choice with this introduction. To me, this introduction was not meant to be controversial in any way. I believe that hamburger buttons are one of the most recognisable UI elements, and I don’t think that companies like Apple would use them without doing their homework.

That being said, it was not my intent to promote them as such. I didn’t do any profound research on the topic, and this article is not meant for user interface designers, but for developers that want or need to implement such a button because it either fits their use case or because the designers made the decision.

I’ll amend the intro to be more careful in the wording.

You came in a bit hot with your initial comment, but thanks for your feedback :)

[reaperducer]

The icon was designed and introduced in 1981.

"Designed and introduced" on the Xerox Star, which almost nobody used. It was quickly forgotten for 30 years, and only came back into use in 2009, according to Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburger_button

[anthk]

This. These younger users thinking the 00's and the 90's where like their child years are pretty much deluded.

And it's odd because you can emulate W98, W2k, WXP and old GNU/Linux distros with damn ease in order to understand that no wm or desktop environment offerred a hamburger menu. And, trust me, lots of people tried zillions on WM's, tons of FVWM2 setups with bizarre configs highly divergent between themselves and no hamburguer button could be found in any of them.

And I can say the FVWM2 and fluxbox/blackbox guys were pioneers on lots of modern GUI trends and current minimalism or paradigm breaking shifts. If you were an UI designer for sure you tweaked FVWM2 and GTK2/QT3 themes to create weird and crazy things such as a dock composed of minified thumbnails created from windows, later done on Windows' Aero taskbar.

Like this:

https://fvwm.sourceforge.net/screenshots/desktops/

2003:

https://fvwm.sourceforge.net/screenshots/desktops/Nuno_Alexa...

2001:

https://fvwm.sourceforge.net/screenshots/desktops/Tavis_Orma...

[micahdeath]

I think the (OS name here) start menu is the hamburger menu. Except on mac, they have several icons that are hamburger menus =/ It's common, just different icon.

[anthk]

No, not all. The start menu is a launcher icon with the most common software. Fvwm had a similar root menu, but with no icon for it, you just clicked anywhere. The hamburguer menu today it's used as a application menu replacement.

Back in the day it wasn't used, period. Any software, either Win32, Motif, Delphi, Athena or such used a menu to access the most common items, the settings and a toolbar for functions. There was no icon replacing all of it.

The same with Macs. Mac OS 8, 9, and then, X. No hamburguer menu. The uberknown Mac menu and a set of Cocoa icons. That it.

[frereubu]

That depends very much on your demographic. Over 60s? Over 70s? From personal expereince helping older people with devices I doubt that it's familiar to quite a few people around that kind of threshold.

[jen729w]

Speaking of which (loosely), if anyone from LinkedIn is reading this your Campaign Manager has one of the dumbest pieces of UI I’ve seen in a long time.

It’s the old ‘three dots signify some sort of button’ pattern. Except these dots hide crucial functionality — think activate your campaign — and just kinda float in the middle of the row, surrounded by other actual buttons, and they don’t even have a border!

My parter figured it out eventually and when she said, hey, I found where that option is … that was a real head-slapping can it be this bad sort of moment.

From LI’s perspective this was days of income they didn’t get from us because we couldn’t figure out how to turn the damned thing on!

Hard to believe how this got through user testing.

[hinkley]

I'm pretty sure Hamburgers started becoming common around 2008-9, so that's three decades we've been using them even though it's only 14 years.

But in trying to figure out when they became prominent, I discovered that some dude at Xerox invented them in 1981.

[atestu]

I agree. Hamburger buttons were popularized with smartphones so they are still relatively new. Here's a good breakdown on why they suck https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menus/

tl;dr "Discoverability is cut almost in half by hiding a website’s main navigation. Also, task time is longer and perceived task difficulty increases."

[robinsonb5]

> I agree. Hamburger buttons were popularized with smartphones so they are still relatively new.

I have an (admittedly ancient) Android smartphone in my pocket which has dedicated physical menu and back buttons. I don't recall seeing hamburger menus until phone manufacturers started being too cheap to include that menu button.

Now they're everywhere, even (especially) when they're not remotely appropriate. What could be more ridiculous than a touchscreen-oriented menu button in a text editor (looking at you, Gedit) or a VCD waveform viewer (looking at you, GtkWave)?

[at-fates-hands]

I'm an accessibility engineer and hamburger menus on mobile are almost always completely inaccessible. A majority of the time they need to be fixed in order to accommodate visually impaired users or users who depend on VoiceOver or other screen reading technologies. Its practically a default issue at this point.

[frereubu]

Is this improved with the use of attributes like aria-controls and aria-expanded, or is there a deeper issue?

[at-fates-hands]

Yes, using aria attributes does help, but most of the older sites we're trying to make accessible don't have these. Most of the time its a simple coding fix to add these though.

The other issue is the placement of the menu in the upper right or left hand corner is nearly impossible to find with TalkBack or VoiceOver controls. Sometimes even with aria attributes, you really have to search with your finger to find the menu and interact with it.

[frereubu]

Thanks for that. We take care to build with aria attributes, but the search for the menu icon is something I hadn't considered. Is top right / left corner not enough of a convention for a menu hamburger that it's difficult to find, or is is more about the size of that button?

[at-fates-hands]

Its mostly about the size.

When you use VoiceOver for example, an easy test is dragging your finger down the middle of the screen, you should be able to access the majority of the content - when the menu is tucked too far up in the corner, or too small, it gets obscured by the logo, CTA or anything else that's in the area and gets bypassed by VoiceOver.

Making it large enough to find by simply dragging your finger down the middle of the screen is a good enough test to determine if its big enough, too small or located somewhere it would be skipped by those screen reader tools.

Hope that helps.

[mixmastamyk]

What is the preferred design?

[deltarholamda]

I prefer an actual menu. Not one of the deeply nesting, expands on rollover sorts of menus (about half of them disappear if you mis-mouse out), but just a handful of clickable text buttons or whatever that hit the major navigation points.

BigCorps Inc. don't like these, because each menu choice has 3 departments and 14 sub-departments that mate-guard their particular menu area, so designers just give up on mobile and hide it all behind the hamburger icon.

It's absolutely daft. Your Web site should be an extra employee, never-tiring, always at work, facilitating the customer or visitor's needs. It's really weird, but depressingly predictable.

[micahdeath]

Simplify the navigation. Do you really need a "Start Menu" on a web page? (Sorry, I think Hamburger menus are start menus.)

[at-fates-hands]

I don't think the org that I work for has really found it.

Enlarging the menu so its easier to find with screen reader tools like TalkBack and VoiceOver has been somewhat effective. However, if you have split menu's, login, search and other features, you start running into complex design issues with where to put all of those and whether you want to stuff them all in the mobile menu, outside the menu or a combination of the two. When you start putting features like search and login into the mobile menu, that also creates more accessibility issues as well.

Designing for accessibility can get really complex, really fast and I'm not sure there's really a solid design pattern yet that addresses all of the issues we're seeing now.

I know that's not a great answer, but it just highlights the complexity of designing for accessibility.

[layer8]

Look at the top of this very page. That design works quite well.