Do you hate hamburger menus?

boing
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Well, I hate them, especially when built into desktop applications that used to have menus.

But then, I’m reliably informed that I’m an ancient spirit of evil, so what do I know?

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Is there a veggie burger option?

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It’s Bootstrap.

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Came here to complain about Carl Jr’s completely illegible menus.
It’s a spastic mish-mash of fonts, styles, sizes and pornographic illustrations of food, crammed into the smallest space possible.

I suppose its a metaphor for the restaurant itself, which most seem to also contain a Green Burrito as a parasitic twin competing for floor space & attention

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I remember floppy disks well enough to wonder if the disc’s shutter mechanism seemed a little off, as if there’s no room for it to open. Here’s a photograph of the real thing.

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I do know that for the longest time, the microsoft office save icon had the shutter window on the wrong side

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27

I don’t hate the hamburger.

A purpose exists, the hamburger serves it; I have no better symbol to offer.

Origins? Overtones? I don’t know, but I like to think of it as the trigram Qián from the I Ching.

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Came here just to say that. They’re pretty intuitive on mobile pages, but just look odd on desktop pages.

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two things:

  1. i confess i’ve never clicked on that icon before now, so i had no idea what it was for, and
  2. now that i know what it’s for and what it’s called… WHY is it called that??
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Disk shutter? Well lah-tee-dah!

C-64 Tape Drive or Nothing!

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Old School.

Notcher1b.jpg910×612 155 KB

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I remember those…, but I never had a cassette drive.

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33

Agreed. Use them all the time in mobile.

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The Worst. Everything took forever, especially in kid years. I think we lasted about three months.

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There are a couple of problems you have when you first encounter it. Here they are in the order that my brain encountered them:

  1. “That’s weird. This site has no links for useful information. Usually when that’s the case, there’s a menu of other options, but I don’t see that here.”

  2. If you’re on a desktop – and yes, you will see the burger menu all the time if your window is docked or reasonably sized – you might try cntl+F: menu. Nope. Nothing.

  3. "There’s a button at the top. Three lines. I almost missed it. What does three lines mean? It is a new bit of cruft like the Twitter bird, Facebook “f”, or Pinterest stylized “P”…?

  4. “… or maybe it’s something specific to this site? That would be a good symbol for a forum. It looks like a php BBS in microcosm.”

  5. “Wait, maybe that’s the menu button I was looking for. Or maybe it downloads a 2 GB PDF of a naked Bea Arthur, which costs me time, bandwidth, and sanity. Worth the gamble?”

  6. “Okay, I’ll take the gamble on that symbol. It’s a menu! Now that I know this is the menu button, I’ve learned it for now and forever. It is still not a good button. You know what really conveys the concept of a menu? The word ‘menu’. It would be a little better if it at least had some dots before the lines, like a bulleted list of text. Or if it were more detailed and actually looked like a miniature version of the drop-down it produced.”

With sufficient time, you could train me that any symbols should be expected to correspond to any action. You tell me often enough that the coil-of-poo emoji is a perfectly reasonable symbol to convey, “call tech support,” and eventually I’ll accept it and start using it. That still doesn’t mean it’s a good symbol.

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wow, that’s such an old-school reference i’m surprised that didn’t occur to me. thanks!

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Omigosh! My bro and I used to make cash doing this for a neighbor, making them double-sided. Wow.

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I was your cheap other neighbor that just used some scissors.

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Yeah, I hate 'em. It’s just so nondescript. The software I train people on introduced them across most of its applications on the last major iteration, and I can guarantee that it is the first thing that my clients forget; or the one thing that they are going ‘doop de doop de doo’ during when I explain it to them. I think most users don’t even realise it’s a button.

I don’t care to admit how long I was typing a ‘bbs.’ prefix on the boingboing web address to access the forums, after you changed your layout.

I agree though that much as it isn’t an icon that screams ‘menu’, I haven’t seen a better one so far.

And at least it isn’t served in a disgusting glazed brioche bun, like every burger in London since last year.

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