Chapter #23. Don't Hide Items Away in a "Hamburger" Menu
Few UI patterns can be as controversial as the hamburger menu. Over the past five years it's become the de facto way of offering a menu on small displays, typically as a website scales into mobile or tablet width using responsive design:
The dreaded hamburger
Research shows ("Hamburger Menus and Hidden Navigation Hurt UX Metrics" NNG, (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menus/) 2016) that hamburger menus:
- Slow down discovery time for users
- Increase perceived task difficulty
- Slow down time to complete a task
Simply put, the hamburger menu hides items away from users and makes them less discoverable. Additionally, because the menu is hidden, users can't gain a sense of "where they are" in the product.
Some alternative design patterns to the hamburger menu:
- Navigation on the bottom of the view:Made popular by iOS apps, you can get four or five key features into an ever-present bottom menu and maybe make the fifth item "fly out" with advanced tools.
- Tabbed navigation Inverting the above, and popularized by Android apps, items can live at the top of the view.
- Vertical type: Pin your navigation to the left of the view and orient the type vertically. It won't solve every problem, but if you have fewer than six or seven iems, it's better than the hamburger.
In some circumstances, for example if your app has a lot of features that need to be "possible" (see #96 Decide Whether an Interaction Should Be Obvious, Easy, or Possible), the usability trade-off seems worth making, in order to offer these features on mobile rather than removing them, but never use a hamburger menu on the desktop.
If you must use a hamburger menu, then label it menu and spare the user the much-maligned "three lines" icon.