The evolution of digital media design, like any form of evolution, is a messy process. Forms are created, tested, refined, destroyed and created again — and no one innovation or feature is safe from the Darwinian razor.
Take, for example, the “hamburger button.” That little icon with three lines which, in many mobile devices, serves as the shortcut to settings, site navigation and display options. Along with the Facebook “F” and the Twitter “T,” it’s become one of the semiotic hallmarks of the smartphone era. But for all its popularity, not everyone loves it. Some even want to remove it from design systems completely.
In an article posted earlier this year, Josh Constine of TechCrunch.com declared the hamburger button “the devil” and urged all digital media professionals and Web designers to cease using it. His argument was that the button is unintuitive, lazy and inefficient — and there may be some truth to his claims.
“The hamburger button is not the best system,” Patrick Meehan, an interactive and social media student at DePaul, said. “It’s not as interactive as, say, a tab menu or settings wheel.”
Interactivity, in this sense, refers to how easy and fun it is for users to navigate a website and absorb its information. Typically, pressing the hamburger button pushes aside or subsumes the home screen, forcing users to sacrifice one menu for another. Tab menus and wheels, on the other hand, involve a graphical icon appearing on screen; users can access the menus they need while still navigating the site proper.
There’s also the matter of the hamburger’s iconography. The button is, in theory at least, supposed to resemble a bullet-point list. And while some incarnations do, others look like, well, a hamburger: three stacked lines. There are zero indicators to suggest that it is the “site navigation/menu” button. For older generations and people not accustomed to digital media, it can be obtuse.
“Even I get confused by it sometimes,” Web designer Sean Cannata said. “It’s not always clear what it does for a particular website or app.”
“For older people especially, tool tips (options) are essential,” Meehan said.
The hamburger button is not without its defenders, however.Denise Nacu, a professor at DePaul’s College of Digital Media, said though it is an arbitrary symbol, it’s no different than any of the other arbitrary symbols people have learned over the years.
“It’s just a convention,” she said. “Users will learn how things work by operating them. The triangle iconography for the play button is a great example of this. If it’s the first time I’m using a video player and I press the button with the play icon, I see that it plays and now I know what it does. I learn to associate that symbol with that experience.”
It’s also important to remember that the hamburger can serve as a “cheat” button, allowing designers to grow their site’s versatility without having to pay for expensive, complex features like a graphics menu or finger swipe. And though it may not be as user-friendly as other navigation options, Meehan said it is an effective way to make sure that the rest of the website or app remains streamlined.
“The important thing to consider is how much screen space you have left,” he said. “The hamburger button lets you dedicate the rest of the site to content, without tabs taking up screen space.”
With that in mind, it seems likely that the hamburger button is here to stay — at least for the time being. Differing philosophies to design, resource availability and debate over visual representation of data will keep it off a digital chopping block. But it is far from perfect and, more importantly, it is a form in an evolutionary arms race. If the processes that led to its creation are any indication, its future is far from certain.
“The job of a UX designer is to take the experience, identify the problems, and then implement solutions to those problems,” Meehan said.