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I think it went sideways when developers abandoned the menu bar accross the top of the screen like all OS X apps have, and all windows apps used to have, but ar

I think it went sideways when developers abandoned the menu bar accross the top of the screen like all OS X apps have, and all windows apps used to have, but are now hidden from view). I think this was replaced by icons because translation into other languages was difficult with the tools of the time, and is difficult now because even with web technologies like Angular and PoEdit making the tools side of things easy you still need someone who understands the language to do the translation. So text translations got dumped for icons, and oftentimes the icons are terrible (like the hamburger menu which is just awful imo).

tracker1 10y ago
The hamburger menu icon is about as old as GUI based interfaces[1]. That said, it's about time and context... knowing and having the website's logo in the top left actually be a link to the homepage and getting people to understand that took a bit of time. Also, the phone icon is probably the worst example today... most people born after 1985 have never seen a phone that even resembles the common icon/glyph (I'm a bit older than that, but still). I do feel that the swipe from the side menus are really unintuitive, and better left tethered to an on-screen (even if it scrolls off) button/icon in addition to swipe interaction, at least until it becomes very common. A lot of the changes are because of size constrained devices, and a return to the concept that someone can only really see or think about a few things at a time. Then again, using OSX, Windows and Linux UIs on a regular bases, along with differences in apps that are cross platform, I may be too lenient of a judge here. [1] https://blog.placeit.net/history-of-the-hamburger-icon/ https://blog.placeit.net/history-of-the-hamburger-icon/