- The hamburger menu was so rapidly adopted and remains so beloved by digital designers that it may be too late to change course anytime soon. It’s built into every major front-end framework, every new WordPress theme, and pretty much every new site that’s been designed in the last couple of years.
And that’s a really bad thing.
That's a really fine argument; that people gloss over the 'Buger when sniffing for navigation cues was particularly compelling. Up until now I accepted the Hamburger Menu as a necessary design compromise to make a mobile experience work well, and thought people would just get use to it with sufficient adoption like people got used to the Start Menu. But it is an ugly, unintuitive abstraction, and one of the worst compromises to solve the mobile UI navigation problem; designers can and should do better. It makes me wonder whether we should be looking at the more novel ways in which mobile users can interface–like gestures, or movement input–that can be a pretty intuitive and totally invisible solution, if only some well designed, codified and broadly adopted design language was used.
My undergrad university's Cognitive Science department has different major specializations like Neuroscience, Computation, Clinical, etc. One of the most popular was Human-Computer Interaction. My first reaction was wtf why is this in CogSci, if it's all web design why isn't it in Computer Science or something? Then it hit me: because web designers have no fucking clue how to put themselves in the mind of the user, understand how the user behaves, and cater to that accordingly.
I agree, the concept is non-intuitive. Yesterday, I tried to explain to my grandma how to check for train and bus connection on her new iPad using the app provided by the public transport company. Of course, they had a hamburger menu to hide all the gazillion things you can do with the app, but my grandma was not able to find it and even then, she struggled with opening it because it was small and jammed into the upper left corner. I got used to looking for things inside the menu, but I can see how many people aren't. Plus, I like the simplicity of tabs