Does hamburger (sandwich) menu is really important for better user experience?
Here is a short article about sandwiches or burger menus everywhere. Even if they are meaningless.
Sandwich is more about type of menu with many too different ungroupable parameters. As known only approximately a half of users (54%) are recognise that the website menu is hidden by sandwich menu. Some of designers are believe that burger menu makes website looks more fashion, but it is not how it looks.
I found three most common ways of menu design:
1) Only sandwich
2) Opened menu and sandwich icon
3) Opened menu
Let’s see some close
1. Only sandwich menu is dangerous because of misunderstanding for users of what three parallel horizontal lines are meaning. You relies all website navigation on one little icon. And if the user didn’t find it he can’t use website at all. Designer should give the user as much native ways of interaction as it possible and also be polite and not overwhelm the interface. It’s also un useful if you have three or five points of menu: better to show them all
2. Opened menu and sandwich menu works good together if you have too many points of menu. It’s good to combine visible most important for user navigation titles with hidden under the menu icon less common points.
It’s cool to make them clean to understand where exactly the label links.
3. Opened menu. It’s the perfect case if all your website navigation made of three or five menu links. And the opened menu with recognisable labels will be the best. Open menu will help you to avoid double meaning when personal user needed to check most common label in open menu than go to sandwich and check it again there.
Summary
Open menu and open menu with hamburger menu are more understandable than just hamburger menu. Try to not to use one icon menu label to avoid attention and recognition user mistakes
Author: Olia Nayda
Inspired by: Maria Bedritskaya
