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Took me a while to find why they picked a hamburger icon over anything else but here it is: > Smith: The three lines were an abstract image of what would come

Took me a while to find why they picked a hamburger icon over anything else but here it is: > Smith: The three lines were an abstract image of what would come up if you clicked on the button—a pop-down menu. and thats why today we still use a hamburger icon for a generic menu

p4bl0 6y ago
It's a good design. It has always been obvious to me that was the idea. Actually it took a bit of time for me to understand that "the hamburger icon" was the "menu icon", I saw the menu in there well before I saw the hamburger.
- hnlmorg 6y ago
  The first time I came across the menu icon it was in Oracle Applications and referred to as "the beer mug". Though I suspect the icon might have been rotated 90 degrees for that name to fit.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  It's a funny thing, when you first learn a computing/UI term and only much later you discover the thing it's supposed to skeuomorph / be an analog of. For me, this was icons. I've learned what they are in GUIs as a small kid. I've only discovered the original meaning of the word - religious pictures painted on wood - many, many years later. Related phenomenon happens for people for whom English isn't their primary language. Like myself, they're likely to learn terms of modern computing on their own terms, without referring to the underlying analogies, because they don't know the non-computing meanings of English words just yet. For me, the notable examples were "desktop" and "menu", which I internalized entirely without any reference to what these words ordinarily mean in English. I bring this up every now and then, because the experience of people of my generation in non-English-speaking countries is one big counterexample for the idea that UIs have to be "intuitive" and refer to non-computing concepts. (As for the "hamburger menu", I of course knew what the hamburger was, but it took me a while to "see it" in that icon. Perhaps if the outside lines were rounded, instead of straight, then it would have resembled an actual hamburger.)
  - p_l 6y ago
    To this day the only way I associate "hamburger" with that icon is memorization through constant hammering.
  - aikinai 6y ago
    I’m a native English speaker, but I’m pretty sure this thread is the first time in my life that a computer menu and a food menu have come in contact in my mind. Of course they’re the same, and that’s why they called it a menu on the computer, but they’re just so far apart in real life they have zero association in my mind, like homonyms that don’t have a shared meaning.
    - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
      Same, but I think a computer might be my first use of a menu.
- slavik81 6y ago
  I found the hamburger menu very surprising the first time I encountered it. It's identical in appearance to the drag handle symbol. The drag handle even has an obvious physical interpretation: the lines are ridges. It's a textured surface designed to be pressed upon and pushed or pulled.
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    On which OS/DE?
    - slavik81 6y ago
      It was used in iOS and Android applications [1]. That was where I found it most confusing. Website headers would look exactly like those dragable items. Windows previously used similar texturing in a few places, including for scrollbars in Windows XP through to Windows 7 [2]. I think it was also used in other contexts, but I can't find a screenshot. [1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/s9fSU.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/s9fSU.jpg [2]: https://cdn.evilmartians.com/front/posts/scroll-to-the-future-modern-javascript-css-scrolling-implementations/windows_scrollbars-8d49827.png https://cdn.evilmartians.com/front/posts/scroll-to-the-futur...
the_other 6y ago
I tried to read the article, but it was obscured by a popup. On my phone, the popup was so big it covered all the words in the first paragraph, so I couldn’t tell id I wanted to read the whole article. Thanks for the summary. Thanks for doing the work to get past the popup. I’m really glad GDPR has given people (in the EU) rights and powers over data about them. I’m SO disappointed that even design blogs have decided that analytics cookies are more important to them than usability of their site.
- csunbird 6y ago
  They just want people to be annoyed to the point where they click "Accept All" button, which they conveniently highlighted several times next to near invisible "Reject All" button, without thinking. We need a law to make dark patterns like this illegal.
  - zinekeller 6y ago
    > We need a law to make dark patterns like this illegal. Surprisingly, that's called the GDPR! Sadly, there are still no cases where comapnies are fined hard that will stop others from even considering dark patterns (at least in consent).
  - marssaxman 6y ago
    I attempt to resist this abusive behavior by refusing to click "accept", ever: instead, I use uBlock Origin's element picker to remove the overlay, then carry on as though it never existed.

p4bl0 6y ago

It's a good design. It has always been obvious to me that was the idea. Actually it took a bit of time for me to understand that "the hamburger icon" was the "menu icon", I saw the menu in there well before I saw the hamburger.

hnlmorg 6y ago
The first time I came across the menu icon it was in Oracle Applications and referred to as "the beer mug". Though I suspect the icon might have been rotated 90 degrees for that name to fit.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
It's a funny thing, when you first learn a computing/UI term and only much later you discover the thing it's supposed to skeuomorph / be an analog of. For me, this was icons. I've learned what they are in GUIs as a small kid. I've only discovered the original meaning of the word - religious pictures painted on wood - many, many years later. Related phenomenon happens for people for whom English isn't their primary language. Like myself, they're likely to learn terms of modern computing on their own terms, without referring to the underlying analogies, because they don't know the non-computing meanings of English words just yet. For me, the notable examples were "desktop" and "menu", which I internalized entirely without any reference to what these words ordinarily mean in English. I bring this up every now and then, because the experience of people of my generation in non-English-speaking countries is one big counterexample for the idea that UIs have to be "intuitive" and refer to non-computing concepts. (As for the "hamburger menu", I of course knew what the hamburger was, but it took me a while to "see it" in that icon. Perhaps if the outside lines were rounded, instead of straight, then it would have resembled an actual hamburger.)
- p_l 6y ago
  To this day the only way I associate "hamburger" with that icon is memorization through constant hammering.
- aikinai 6y ago
  I’m a native English speaker, but I’m pretty sure this thread is the first time in my life that a computer menu and a food menu have come in contact in my mind. Of course they’re the same, and that’s why they called it a menu on the computer, but they’re just so far apart in real life they have zero association in my mind, like homonyms that don’t have a shared meaning.
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    Same, but I think a computer might be my first use of a menu.
slavik81 6y ago
I found the hamburger menu very surprising the first time I encountered it. It's identical in appearance to the drag handle symbol. The drag handle even has an obvious physical interpretation: the lines are ridges. It's a textured surface designed to be pressed upon and pushed or pulled.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  On which OS/DE?
  - slavik81 6y ago
    It was used in iOS and Android applications [1]. That was where I found it most confusing. Website headers would look exactly like those dragable items. Windows previously used similar texturing in a few places, including for scrollbars in Windows XP through to Windows 7 [2]. I think it was also used in other contexts, but I can't find a screenshot. [1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/s9fSU.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/s9fSU.jpg [2]: https://cdn.evilmartians.com/front/posts/scroll-to-the-future-modern-javascript-css-scrolling-implementations/windows_scrollbars-8d49827.png https://cdn.evilmartians.com/front/posts/scroll-to-the-futur...

the_other 6y ago

I tried to read the article, but it was obscured by a popup. On my phone, the popup was so big it covered all the words in the first paragraph, so I couldn’t tell id I wanted to read the whole article. Thanks for the summary. Thanks for doing the work to get past the popup. I’m really glad GDPR has given people (in the EU) rights and powers over data about them. I’m SO disappointed that even design blogs have decided that analytics cookies are more important to them than usability of their site.

csunbird 6y ago
They just want people to be annoyed to the point where they click "Accept All" button, which they conveniently highlighted several times next to near invisible "Reject All" button, without thinking. We need a law to make dark patterns like this illegal.
- zinekeller 6y ago
  > We need a law to make dark patterns like this illegal. Surprisingly, that's called the GDPR! Sadly, there are still no cases where comapnies are fined hard that will stop others from even considering dark patterns (at least in consent).
- marssaxman 6y ago
  I attempt to resist this abusive behavior by refusing to click "accept", ever: instead, I use uBlock Origin's element picker to remove the overlay, then carry on as though it never existed.