Why the hamburger menu should be killed for good
I get it. Minimalism is the goal. All the navigation in one place? Hamburger menus are a beautiful solution right. But, is it?
We are all familiar with the design, the icon which is comprised of three horizontal lines found at the top of an app or a website. But where did it all start?
The history of the hamburger menu
This menu was initially designed by Norm Cox for the Xerox Star, the world’s first graphical user interface. After Xerox Star, however, the icon disappeared for quite some time.
Incomes the smartphone with their 4” displays and UX designers had to find new ways to cram those multitude of buttons found on the navigation bar to something much smaller in size, in order to maximize the screen real estate of their tiny displays.
Mobiles embraced the menu
That’s when the hamburger menu came to save the day. Everyone opted the hamburger menu over having a navigation tab at the top or the bottom of the screen. Google embraced the hamburger menu, making Android one of the early adopters of this design component, going as far as to included it in their extremely popular material design guidelines. Google even made it much convenient, by adding swipe gestures to summon the hamburger menu.
And before we knew it smartphones started driving the internet. More and more people started using their mobile devices to access the internet since it was much convenient. In order to maintain the consistency between their mobile apps and their desktop counterparts’ companies started introducing the concept of the hamburger menu to their websites too. Some just wanted to keep up to the design trends (as hamburger menus were all the hype back then) hamburger menus started popping up everywhere.
Just accept it, the hamburger menu doesn’t work
I know, I know. I was just saying how useful it was (was being the key word). Using it in websites/web apps was never justified, it was about the consistency and pure aesthetics over usability. The argument to be made is, that if the menu items are so important, shouldn’t they be visible to users all the time?
Even though Google jumped on the bandwagon, Apple refused to do so. The guys at Cupertino are all about presentation of tech (they have packaging designers unboxing hundreds of boxes just to test the unboxing experience, for crying out loud). For those of you guys using iPhone, have you ever seen any of the “Apple-made” apps using a hamburger menu? Here’s what Mike Stern, an Apple UX Evangelist said about the use of hamburger menus on WWDC 2014.
“Remember, the key things about an intuitive navigation system is that they tell you where you are, and they show you where else you can go.”
“Hamburger menus are terrible at both of those things, because the menu is not on the screen. It’s not visible. Only the button to display the menu is. And in practice, talking to developers, they found this out themselves.”
Most major companies are moving away from the hamburger menu for this very reason. Facebook, Spotify and even YouTube have opted for a tab-based navigation menu on their mobile apps and web apps. Spotify said that in doing so has increased the navigation clicks by 30%.
It’s time to move on…
Smartphones displays have doubled in their size over the last 5 years. With taller aspect ratios there is more screen real estate than ever. The position of the hamburger menu button has been inconvenient for the past few years and it is now at its worst possible state (good thing there’s that swipe gesture, right?). Following the iPhone X Android has also switched to a gesture-based navigation system in their latest Android version Android 10. Like it or not it is the future of mobile navigation (Android gesture navigation clashes with the hamburger menu gesture, plot twist!). The hamburger menu frequently provides overlap into key navigation items. As a design component, it’s a compromise. All that being said the existence of the hamburger menu button is questionable in 2020. Even Google is moving on (Google app, Google Maps, Google Photos, Google Play Games), suggesting that it’s time to move on.