The hamburger-menu icon today: Is it recognizable?

But the designs literally go from bad to good once people know how to use them. Unlike war, which is bad whether people are used to it or not. If you're insisting the hamburger design is bad for some other reason rather than people not knowing how to use it, it's the same mistake the designers made in the first place when they insisted it was good despite people not knowing how to use it.

I use to know a gamer who used a phone for something like a decade. He got stuck doing something and I had to point out the burger to him. The thing he was looking for was interestingly enough not there. Apparently all websites he used were perfectly usable without knowing the button exists.

In contrast, some people can't not-read something and it being a button is automatically parsed out. Symbols and icons have to be learned which is a more gradual process. The other day I didn't recognize the flower icon for settings.

Well, to put it in perspective, consider these three words:

Menu Settings Notepad

If these are actionable buttons, the message is encoded and decoded by viewers.

Three bars means what, exactly? There’s the cognitive load.

Judging from the list of languages that have "menu" as a word (with a comparable definition to "menu"), I don't think it's a stretch for people to know what the word "menu" means: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/menu , it's not even originally an English word afterall.

You're assuming that it's an agreed and understood standard, which it really isn't. Tech savvy audiences often don't find it easy to understand that there are lots of people who don't understand things like this.

In terms of using MENU, if your audience is not English speaking then you can, and should, consider adding internationalisation and localisation as an alternative. If you have considered it for your content, it makes sense to consider it for your UI as well.

Replacing the hamburger icon with the word "Menu" wouldn't make anything better. The problem isn't the icon, it's the disorganization.

There is more than enough room for 4 menus across the top of a typical mobile device. If you expect the user to need to access it regularly, you could even put it across the bottom. This is why the homescreen on most phones has 4 items across the bottom; not a single hamburger menu with "Phone, Messages, Web, ..."

More than anything hamburger menu type design feels to me like an “avoid effort and skill as much as possible” sort of thing more than it does an “optimize ad revenue” sort of thing, as does flat design. It’s about lowering the bar for what’s acceptable to ship as far as you can possibly get away with. Plaster some scrolling flat rounded rectangles and a hamburger menu on the screen and boom you’ve got an app.

I had to look up "CUA".

Common User Access (CUA) is a standard for user interfaces developed by IBM to provide consistency across operating systems and computer programs.

My problem with it mostly that it hides functionality. Seeing a hamburger menu gives you no insight as to what options exist under it.

The menu itself also tends to be a "grab bag" of multiple otherwise unconnected things, increasing the effort required to figure out how to do something.

I know it's only anecdotal, but my mom doesn't get it. She's not super interested in her iPad and basically only uses it when she has to or for FaceTime. She'd be the perfect test subject for stress testing UIs and more interfaces than you'd think are doing a pretty poor job of explaining themselves. Not many icons are intuitive, hiding something in modal windows, muscle memory/dexterity and precision are all problem areas.

The hamburger is basically all of that rolled into one button. It's pretty abstract, you never know what's behind it and when they get fancy with animations and swipe gestures, it's almost always a failure.

I know it's a convenient way to clean up a screen, but the content in that menu needs to be absolutely optional for it to work.

The implication of "load" is not that it's a huge hurdle, but just that it takes longer (even a tiny bit) for most users to visually assess what it means. Add up all those little delays, and you have a frustrated new user.

I regularly use a piece of software from IBM that has (this won't surprise you) an awful UI. There are not one but TWO hamburger menus, hidden amongst a bunch of text menu headings, and figuring out where the one you want is can be noticeably taxing. Explaining to another user where to click is even worse - "No, not that one, the one under the... to the right..."

Any symbolic visual takes time for our brains to decode. When compared to language which we’ve spent our entire lives decoding and which comes much naturally, the cognitive burden is much higher.

In addition the three bars are as mundane of a composition as you can get, so it doesn’t capture the eye well to begin with. Typically the eye gets pulled to more visually complexity.

But ultimately it boils down to the decoding idea—language is the ultimate “codec” of human communication.

I don't think it matters which side. What matters more is that everyone does it the same. Most times, I see it on the right.

I think of its default as "top left". But "top right" is frequent.

"Not quite top, mostly right" is where IBM puts their SECOND hamburger icon on DNG software. May they rot in eternity...

Most of us Westerners read left-to-right, while being right-handed.

Thus:

"Where should I go?" is answered quickly in the top-left.

Whilst experts repeatedly accessing on Mobile requires top-right.

Just depends on your priorities.

Great if you are an English speaker. Do we then translate that to every language we need to support? Do we scale the UI to work for the different length words?

I dont think that is any better at all. If anything I think its solidly worse.

Absolutely just use the word "MENU" instead, if the button's already in a textual interface. And if not, labeling the hamburger is almost always better than leaving it naked. But I think there are better overall solutions to be found outside of the local maximum, if you will.