I recall when Boingboing introduced it without any explanation. I hadn’t encountered it before (or hadn’t recognised it if I had) and took it for a bit of decoration. I don’t know how long it was before it occurred to me that it was a button, or that it wasn’t an equivalence sign, but it was on the order of weeks.
That’s a bad habit that BB could do well to break: introducing changes without any guidance, turning the interface into an test of intelligence or hip-ness, or a scavenger hunt among the threads.
I think that’s the main problem. No-one really likes this icon but equally no-one has come up with a better alternative. But as others have pointed out I don’t think that’s a problem. Most people don’t know the origin of the power icon yet we all know what it does. And when was the last time you searched for something in real life using a magnifying glass?
The point is, we’re learning to use the hamburger menu and once you know what it does and get used to using it I think it becomes second nature.
Anyway, I’ve read a couple of articles recently (which annoyingly I can’t now find) about how when apps moved the tabs at the top of the screen to an off-screen menu, engagement massively dropped. It seems to me that a good compromise would be to have your main three actions visible on screen with additional actions behind a hamburger menu, but every case is different.
Hate? We don’t care that much, I think. But there are issues with this sort of increasingly-common solution.
To me, the worst is the return of Mystery Meat Navigation from the bad old ‘flash intro’ days: a thing that you have to click on to even know what it is. A very user unfriendly habit, and one we should have outgrown by now in my opinion.
As a side effect of being mysterious and requiring effort, people don’t really use these hidden menus that much and miss out on things. Un-hiding the options instead seems to do wonders for user engagement.
Fancy. All I had was scissors. And I’d slit the top of the diskette to remove the media before punching a mirror-image index hole. Those became really floppy disks.
Button menus are acceptable on small devices, where space is at a premium, but I find them irritating on the desktop.
Ribbons are the opposite problem. I’m sure they work great for the mouse-bound, but they take up a fair amount of real-estate, while pull-down menus are compact when not in use, and are usually annotated with lots of handy keyboard shortcuts for keyboarders who care to learn. Between ribbons on everything and the excessive email header panel in Outlook 2013, MS seems to think that wasted space == user friendly.
The modern UI: keeping the simple simple, while making the difficult even more so.
Seriously, Five Guys probably has it right. I don’t need fifteen variations on a theme, just give me three basic choices. I’ll probably order the same thing anyway.
But as to the topic at hand:
I am getting very pissed off by the proliferation of text-less menus and menu systems. I learned to read English, Arabic, and French, not your cutesy fucking hieroglyphs. It’s all well and good when it is something like a hamburger menu… not sure what it represents (lines of options?) but it has a common meaning. Magnifying glass for search… okay. Floppy-disk for save… fine (I’m old enough to know what those are.) Google is especially bad at this. The first time I tried to use Docs (now Drive) I remember being baffled by the utter lack of descriptive text and frustrated by slow or non-existent tooltips. I know that you’re really smart and have read all kind of books on UX and think that your product is “intuitive.” But “intuitive” is just a buzzword; it’s not meant to be taken literally. The overall effect of using your proprietary ideograms is the same as when people try to use clever labeling on men and women’s restrooms: A lot of fumbling, embarrassment, and the occasional scream.
While trying to find a pic of the really nice disk notcher that my dad had with its guides, and precise die, and other engineeringacoutrements I came across this.
Thanks - that was one of the articles I’d read and couldn’t find to cite!
It is a problem though when you have so little screen space to use and a lot of items to show (I’m thinking more about websites than apps now). I think over the next couple of years we’ll start to see more elegant solutions.
Yeah, I have some raccoons living in the backyard now that I’m not happy about. Adding four more types of mammals isn’t going to make things easier, no matter how many obedient humans I have putting them on ships and sending them overseas.
