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Comment by mikehall314 | Hacker News Reader

Luke Wroblewski has long been a critic of the hamburger icon, citing both that hiding key components of your application behind a burger menu is bad for engagement [1] and that the meaning of that icon as "menu" is not as well understood as we may think [2]. These claims are a few years old now, so things may have moved on -- I would be interested to see up-to-date analysis of how users interact with and understand these icons.

[1] https://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1945 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-FMTPsgy_Y&t=43m45s

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> hiding key components of your application behind a burger menu is bad for engagement

It's still undecided and has become under further scrutinize lately if low engagement actually is a bad thing, considering everything.

Many of the biggest tech companies does nothing but optimizing for engagement, and hence we have viral outrages via social media. Addiction is also played as something that are good for companies, but we're slowly waking up to the notion that optimizing only for engagement was never a good idea for humanity at large.

> ...optimizing only for engagement was never a good idea for humanity at large.

I don't trust companies to have this as an incentive. Profit and revenue are the incentives, and if caring about humanity helps those, then it will considered.

> > ...optimizing only for engagement was never a good idea for humanity at large.

> I don't trust companies to have this as an incentive. Profit and revenue are the incentives, and if caring about humanity helps those, then it will considered.

Wait, are you saying that you prefer for corporations to act like amoral psychopathic profit maximizers?

I don't think there's any preference here; it looks to me like 'milkytron was just describing how it (unfortunately) is now.

I'm not sure why, but I'm in that camp too. I can only assume that there is some piece of shared past computer system experience I don't share with the hamburger menu people.

That icon has just never really been associated with 'menu' for me, so my eyesight just glides over it as if it's not there, and it just doesn't register as a UI component. (And that vertical ellipsis is even worse, doubly so if it repeated in multiple locations within a UI.

Your eyesight glides over it as if it’s not there? Oddly enough, that seems perfect from an uncluttered-design standpoint. Can you still find menus when they’re hidden behind invisible hamburgers, perhaps by association with the top of the page?

Conversely, the hamburger menu always meant "menu" for me, it strongly reminded me of a menu list, and it was the first thing I clicked/tapped when looking for options. Never understood the hate for it, even calling it "hamburger" feels like a straw man argument.

Far better than the new practice of using the profile image for the settings.

"To change to dark mode click the picture of your own face" is way weirder than the hamburger icon.

I find a gear or cog more conceptually engaging than the "hamburger".

Open it up and look at how it works inside, maybe tinker with it.

The three lines have no distinct relation to me that isn't artificial, as least the floppy icon is tied to something that might have a historic meaning. These days I'd probably have a checkmark and a broken checkmark to denote 'checked in' and 'not checked in'. Crucially it would probably need to be two checkmarks when fully checked in, and a single big checkmark in back with a smaller obviously broken one in front to denote an older version exists.

Gear makes sense to me for any kind of settings or configuration. However, hamburger menus are often used for actual content or feature navigation.

Who would suspect finding the, I don’t know, trends list or something behind a gear icon?

I actually never made the connection between "hamburger" and "menu" until your comment. I thought everyone chose "the three lines" for menu as a stylistic choice that everyone copied from each other.

Even though I know what the hamburger icon does and regularly use it, the example in that second video of making it more button-like benefits me, because without clear cues about what's ornamental and what's interactible, it takes more time for my eyes to find things I can click on.

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