Great Alternatives to Hamburger Menus
Kara Pernice and Raluca Budiu:
Hidden navigation, such as the hamburger menu, is one of the many patterns inspired by mobile designs. Screen space is a precious commodity on mobile. To meet the challenge of prioritizing content while still making navigation (and other chrome) accessible, designers commonly rely on hiding the navigation under a menu — often indicated by the infamous hamburger icon. Like a cheap fast food chain, it got designers addicted to its convenience, and now serves millions each day, both on mobile devices and on desktops.
While our qualitative user testing has repeatedly shown that navigation hidden under a drop-down menu is less discoverable on the desktop, we wanted to measure the size of this effect in a quantitative study and assess the relative impact of hidden navigation on the desktop versus mobile.
Mobiscroll (via Andy Bargh):
Hamburger menus drive engagement down, slow down exploration and confuse people. If you are reading this, it won’t confuse you, but it damn will confuse others who might be happy to consume your content.
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I cannot stress this enough. Always design with real content, otherwise you’ll end up with placeholders, lorem ipsums and hamburger menus inside hamburger menus. Content on its own doesn’t make sense, and layouts without content either.
Previously: Apple on Hamburger Menus, The Hamburger Menu Doesn’t Work, Ex-Microsoft Designer Explains the Move Away From Metro, Hamburgers and Basements.
