Slaying Side Menus

I love NY Times iOS application. A lot of news from various categories,I can quickly catch up what’s going in in the World, personalised feed sections. There are too many great features I’ve using often.

But there is one thing I hate about mobile applications is that the Side Menu (A.K.A Hamburger Menu). And NY Times uses it :)

Yeah this one. Invented by UX demons.

Well frankly if you have more than 30 categories in your app. The Side Menu is the best choice. I have to admit that. There is no magic bullet to avoid this.

However I did my best to create an interesting approach to avoid Side Menu.

Salvation

Let’s imagine one day we woke up and there this news on all tv channels. AMUXDF (Awesome Mobile UX Designers Federation, yes its exists) banned usage of Side Menus. As a result we have to create something else.

For the NY Times app removing side menu wasn’t easy task in terms of programmatically and the design. I tried bunch of alternatives such as tab bar and grid menu.

I wanted to create something different, something new !

When I was in my collage years I was making mobile games with Unity. For the mobile games in order to move the character in the scene you have to use joysticks. Below you can find how I implemented joystick menu to the NY Times application.

My approach wasn’t really solving side menu problem. It allows people to quickly browse through their favorite categories. I wanted people to read news only using a single hand.

There is a joystick at the bottom of the screen. When user starts to tap on it, I display the most used categories so user can drag the joystick around. Basically below image is what I’ve planned

Simple Sketch mockup of my idea

I started coding last week. I’ve used NY Times API to fetch top stories. First couple of days were really hard. Implementing a smooth scrolling took a week to implement.

Result

Pros

• A lot faster
• You don’t block the main UI
• People love pressing buttons
• Allows you to read news with single hand

Cons

• Increased development time
• Hard transition for elder users
• Lack of tapping feedbacks

Here is the Github repo of the project