Hamburgers Kill: How Hamburger Menus might be killing your UX?
Be it a mobile app or a website, being the first point of contact between your business and a potential customer, your top priority is to make their experience as smooth and friendly as possible. How to make the customer journey more delightful is one of the most important questions to ask before anything else.
When you hire a web developer or mobile app development company, the first thing that comes to mind is "Design". The design of your app or website is what ensures a good user experience. A well designed app or website is something that is visually appealing and also aligned with the theme of your business. It should also provide an enriched navigation and aim to guide the customer to what they are looking for in a minimum number of clicks or taps.
One such important aspect of design is navigational menus and over the past few years, the theme of Hamburger menus have emerged as a top choice of navigation. So let's take a look at what Hamburger menus are?
What are Hamburger Menus?
If you have a little idea about design, you might already know what Hamburger menus are. For those of you who don't, Hamburger is a frequently-used design trick for adding or rather hiding extra functionality somewhere off your main screens.
More technically speaking, the hamburger menu is a button placed typically in a top corner of a mobile app or website screen. It takes the form of an icon that consists of three parallel horizontal lines, suggestive of a list. Tapping or clicking this button results in a menu being revealed by either sliding out or popping up thereby displaying a list of options or features for the users to select or use.
Hamburger menus are a much debated topic. While some argue it is a great way of saving up precious screen space, it also termed as something that might be seriously affecting or even reducing time spent by users in the app or website. Although hamburger menus offer a lot of advantages, many studies have proven otherwise.
We will be taking a look at some of the negatives of hamburger menus here and also some great alternatives of it.
Disadvantages of Hamburger Menus:
Some of the most major cons of these menus that might require some serious attention are as follows:
1. Poor Discoverability: Hiding the menu behind a small button means it’s less likely to be found and can be the cause of frustration. Majority of the people prefer links that are more visible and hence information is easy to look for. Hiding vital information and links under a small button can significantly decrease your click through rates.
2. Added User Time: A hamburger requires an action or additional click before a user can use it. This involves added time and effort that a user might not be committed to, especially if it’s just one of many sites they’re visiting in a session. The fewer clicks you make to a piece of functionality, usually the more usable and intuitive. This theory has also been tested, which indicated that hamburgers were likely to be clicked 20 percent less than a traditional open navigation tab.
3. Poor Usability: The positioning of hamburgers is usually in the top corner left or right hand area. On mobile screens especially, these are the spots farthest from user's fingers which force them to make an extra effort to select them. This leads to poor usability and hence lower preference of the website or app.
4. Poor User Journey: This disadvantage is primarily based around multi-push menus, a type of hamburger menus. These menus are built of multiple steps or levels, allowing a user to click down through the site structure from within the navigation. These menus can usually encourage users to skip sections of a user journey through the site or app and probably mislead them to sections they were not interested to visit. This leads to a poor user journey and hence increased abandonment rates.
Great Alternatives to Hamburger Menus
Although the hamburger menus might seem like a great choice at first, it definitely isn’t. They are a good option to go with for very specific use cases though. However, if not, there are some other good alternatives to that as mentioned below;
1. Tabs:
Tabs help organize content in categories, like you would under a navigational drawer. People will instantly know how to use it. The best way to put it is by using labels with icons.
2. Bottom navigation
This is a great option for mobile screens. But websites too can use it creatively. This menu is mostly “always visible” and composed of icons with labels at the bottom of the screen. The navigation bar could be hidden/revealed on downward and upward scrolling or even stay fixed.
3. Side Scrolling navigation
This is an approach for longer lists. Make it scroll-able so that users can move it from side-to-side and view the menus. This is mostly recommended for mobile screens though. Icons with labels can be used to explain the side menus. However, it would be better off to test this option first for your audience before committing to it. Websites can get creative and use side slide out menus instead.
4. Inline Scrolling Navigation
This is best suited for website and not a lot for mobile apps though. You can lay out top categories in the home page. All these categories can then be laid out as a list with distinctive headers. These categories can be represented as horizontally scroll-able cards.
Being a little innovative, web developers or mobile app development companies could also create a hybrid to provide you with an even more amazing solution. What this means is that there is no end to the way you can display yourself digitally, just make sure you weigh in your options accurately before making any decisions.
