Where the hell are all my pants

A metaphor for the usability issue with the hamburger menu

See that bag? They’re in there. It’s my weekend-break travel bag. I’m a lazy packer. I chuck handfuls of stuff into a bag with the optimism that if I forget anything I can buy it when I’m there. This often means that I under pack the important stuff and over pack the easy things — pants. I’m also a lazy un-packer. I take out the dirty stuff to wash but often can’t be bothered to take out the less than critical clean things (I blame this on a semi nomadic two years in Europe, living out of a bag). Over time, the bag migrates to the cupboard. I know the pants are there and I know that when I need them I’ll take them out and use them. But I end up relying on the more accessible ones, the ones on my shelves and gradually, like the one ring of power, they fade from memory and into legend. And so I find myself staring into the cupboard on a Monday morning, the bag clearly on display, thinking: where the hell are all my pants.

This is the burger menu problem. Those three little lines that have become a regular feature of interface design. The meat-stack, as we jokingly refer to it at work. It has its use, but too often it can emerge from a lazy approach to organisation or a prioritisation of clean aesthetic over usability. It hides the awkward stuff. The shelves are cleaner, the wardrobe proposition seemingly more straightforward, and the logic plain: they’re there in the bag. 
Everybody knows what a bag is and that it holds stuff. You may even know exactly what it holds! But it’s not exposed. The mind doesn’t work like that at 7.30 in the morning just as it doesn’t work like that when exploring a new digital environment. You need to be given a clue — to be able to see into the bag — to be reminded — tempted to check the contents. Maybe it’s a transparent bag, maybe you just leave it open, maybe you take the stuff out and put it on the shelves — organised nicely. There are better more helpful options.

And so the burger menu is being slowly rethought and questioned. Just as recognition levels reach peak meat-stack it’s becoming clear that recognition isn’t the only problem. Users need the ability to orientate themselves and read the scope of the environment in which they find themselves. The burger menu hides these clues and despite the fact that we know they’re there it is only a focussed, searching mind, armed with a clear objective, that tends to look for and find them. Not the casual browser.

So what are the alternatives? Tabbed navigation is emerging as a first line of attack. The tabs signpost the top level of the menu: the important bits, the clues, or the tempting tips of the iceberg. These flow into pages where further depth can be signposted on the page. Having made an initial top-level segmentation we can then start offering up the next narrative layer in more detail, confident that the use of precious page real estate for signposting will be justified, relevant, and useful to the visitor.

This isn’t to say the burger menu is dead — it’s been around for a while. Since its first appearance on the Xerox Star interface in the 1980s it faded from prominence until the smartphone revolution. It will endure and that’s a good thing, it has its place. But more thoughtful design patterns are emerging and we now need to think twice before reaching for the meat.