I find hamburger menus a bit like pie charts: they’re popular in some quarters, but they have some significant drawbacks and the vast majority of the time there

I find hamburger menus a bit like pie charts: they’re popular in some quarters, but they have some significant drawbacks and the vast majority of the time there is a better way to do the job. For UIs on larger screens, I see no advantage at all in hiding menu items behind a hamburger. It just results in hunting around for a tiny thing to click and making it harder for the user to reach useful choices. However, even on smaller screens, I still try to present a set of related options so they are immediately accessible if possible. One obvious way to do that is having few enough choices that they can all appear together in a compact menu, possibly bumping minor choices down to the page footer or some other secondary position. Achieving this might require careful consideration of the overall design and information architecture, and possibly deviating from the way the same material is presented on other devices in style and/or prioritisation. Another possibility that can work well in some situations is to distribute commands or navigation options throughout the page/app instead of collecting them all together in a menu. Web pages can hyperlink directly from body text or images instead of having to collect all their navigation links together at the top or bottom of the page. Sometimes UIs can similarly attach commands to specific places where they make sense. If there really are too many essential choices to display them tidily embedded within the overall UI on a small screen, my next preference is usually some form of dedicated full-screen navigation. This might make sense for something like an e-commerce web site with lots of different categories, for example, or a business app that provides access to many different reports. With this strategy, I would probably try to have that navigation be the starting point for the UI or at least be summoned via some very obvious and descriptively labelled button. Between those three general strategies and the occasional more specialised alternative, I don’t think I’ve ever had a hamburger menu make it into production on any project — including those where our first thought was that we absolutely had to have loads of options available so a hamburger was “obviously” the way to go. So far, I’ve yet to see or run any substantial usability test where a hamburger was more effective.