Change Details

A few of our desktop apps have been moving to a hamburger menu for presenting UI, and most of our mobile apps utilise a hamburger menu of some form. While doing some research on the topic of hamburger menus, I noticed anything involving actual user testing unanimously (I could not find any sources //**with actual research on users**// that indicated that hamburger menus performed better than other UI elements that could be used instead of them) pointed out that hamburger menus provide worse usability in all sorts of scenarios: users perceived the UI as harder to use, users interacted with hamburger menus less, users took longer to accomplish tasks, among other shortcomings of hamburger menus compared to other UI elements. The sources I found (feel free to edit sources [with actual research/testing, not pure conjecture/opinion as many UX/UI articles on the internet tend to be] into this list:) - https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menus/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20150315043320/http://exisweb.net/mobile-menu-abtest - https://web.archive.org/web/20150314233342/http://exisweb.net/menu-eats-hamburger - https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:922114/FULLTEXT01.pdf&lang=en With that in mind, I would like to propose that we reduce the reliance of our UIs on hambuger menus. Our desktop apps are mostly fine at this, having the hamburger menu as a complement to a proper toolbar + menubar. In our mobile & convergent apps, this is much less true. Core UI elements are located inside hamburger menus frequently, which, as the research above would strongly imply, makes our usability worse. Hamburger menus on mobile aren't an inevitability due to limited screen space as they would seem at first, and a few mobile platforms, most notably iOS, avoid the hamburger menu completely. In fact, Apple has explicitly denounced hamburger menus on iOS multiple times. A fun roast to read from [[ https://youtu.be/PtNJSrymZb8?t=1913 | Apple WWDC 2014 ]] on hamburger menus: https://invent.kde.org/-/snippets/1747 I would like to use this thread to brainstorm design patterns for mobile apps that don't rely on hamburger menus.

A few of our desktop apps have been moving to a hamburger menu for presenting UI, and most of our mobile apps utilise a hamburger menu of some form. While doing some research on the topic of hamburger menus, I noticed anything involving actual user testing unanimously (I could not find any sources //**with actual research on users**// that indicated that hamburger menus performed better than other UI elements that could be used instead of them) pointed out that hamburger menus provide worse usability in all sorts of scenarios: users perceived the UI as harder to use, users interacted with hamburger menus less, users took longer to accomplish tasks, among other shortcomings of hamburger menus compared to other UI elements. The sources I found (feel free to edit sources [with actual research/testing, not pure conjecture/opinion as many UX/UI articles on the internet tend to be] into this list:) - https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menus/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20150315043320/http://exisweb.net/mobile-menu-abtest - https://web.archive.org/web/20150314233342/http://exisweb.net/menu-eats-hamburger - https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:922114/FULLTEXT01.pdf&lang=en With that in mind, I would like to propose that we reduce the reliance of our UIs on hambuger menus. Our desktop apps are mostly fine at this, having the hamburger menu as a complement to a proper toolbar + menubar. In our mobile & convergent apps, this is much less true. Core UI elements are located inside hamburger menus frequently, which, as the research above would strongly imply, makes our usability worse. Hamburger menus on mobile aren't an inevitability due to limited screen space as they would seem at first, and a few mobile platforms, most notably iOS, avoid the hamburger menu completely. In fact, Apple has explicitly denounced hamburger menus on iOS multiple times. A fun roast to read from [[ https://youtu.be/PtNJSrymZb8?t=1913 | Apple WWDC 2014 ]] on hamburger menus: https://invent.kde.org/-/snippets/1747 I would like to use this thread to brainstorm design patterns for mobile apps that don't rely on hamburger menus.

A few of our desktop apps have been moving to a hamburger menu for presenting UI, and most of our mobile apps utilise a hamburger menu of some form. While doing some research on the topic of hamburger menus, I noticed anything involving actual user testing unanimously (I could not find any sources //**with actual research on users**// that indicated that hamburger menus performed better than other UI elements that could be used instead of them) pointed out that hamburger menus provide worse usability in all sorts of scenarios: users perceived the UI as harder to use, users interacted with hamburger menus less, users took longer to accomplish tasks, among other shortcomings of hamburger menus compared to other UI elements. The sources I found (feel free to edit sources [with actual research/testing, not pure conjecture/opinion as many UX/UI articles on the internet tend to be] into this list:) - https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menus/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20150315043320/http://exisweb.net/mobile-menu-abtest - https://web.archive.org/web/20150314233342/http://exisweb.net/menu-eats-hamburger - https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:922114/FULLTEXT01.pdf&lang=en With that in mind, I would like to propose that we reduce the reliance of our UIs on hambuger menus. Our desktop apps are mostly fine at this, having the hamburger menu as a complement to a proper toolbar + menubar. In our mobile & convergent apps, this is much less true. Core UI elements are located inside hamburger menus frequently, which, as the research above would strongly imply, makes our usability worse. Hamburger menus on mobile aren't an inevitability due to limited screen space as they would seem at first, and a few mobile platforms, most notably iOS, avoid the hamburger menu completely. In fact, Apple has explicitly denounced hamburger menus on iOS multiple times. A fun roast to read from [[ https://youtu.be/PtNJSrymZb8?t=1913 | Apple WWDC 2014 ]] on hamburger menus: https://invent.kde.org/-/snippets/1747 I would like to use this thread to brainstorm design patterns for mobile apps that don't rely on hamburger menus.