Starting the UX Journey: Breaking the Burger
Hello Medium!!!
My name is Brian Etheridge, and I am starting on a journey that every senior art student dreads, the final chapter in college: Senior Thesis. The focus of my thesis is how hidden navigation, in web design, is decreasing the discoverability and web analytics of the sites.
Hidden navigation has been an avid design element since the emergence of mobile websites. In particular, the hamburger menu has been the main culprit of this decrease over the years. What is a hamburger menu? Well, it is not a fast-food menu filled with burgers (sadly). You have seen this element at least once while you surf the web, it looks like this:
Last seamster, I tasked my self to research where this icon came from and how it made such an impact for it to be used so commonly. The designer, Norm Cox, designed it to hold miscellaneous features, in the ’80s, within the Xerox Star because they were unable to fit all of the important functions within the toolbar. Then Apple started to use to when they release the iPhone, and from there it started the trend.
After years of it being used, there needs to be a change. To prepare for this undertaking, I have been recently gathering websites that handle website navigation in different ways — hidden, combo, and visible).
Besides scrapping the internet, I have also been reading up on proper research design and presentation methodologies to ensure I am getting accurate and reliable feedback from users as they are tested and questioned about each mode of navigation.
This will be the first of many medium posts from me. So, please follow me and this journey called Senior Thesis to Break This Burger.
