{"id":95370,"date":"2016-06-28T15:41:47","date_gmt":"2016-06-28T13:41:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themeskingdom.com\/?p=95370"},"modified":"2022-06-30T17:08:23","modified_gmt":"2022-06-30T17:08:23","slug":"why-the-hamburger-menu-is-killing-your-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themeskingdom.com\/blog\/why-the-hamburger-menu-is-killing-your-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the hamburger menu is killing your business"},"content":{"rendered":"

The hamburger menu is the three stripes you see in the upper corners of a website. It was inspired by mobile design patterns, where screen space is small (or rather used to be small before phablets showed up). You can\u2019t put too many navigation links on a mobile site, so a new trend birthed itself from this problem: hide the navigation links under a menu. This menu was often designed as the, now notorious, hamburger icon.<\/p>\n

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Designers loved this because now they can just skip over the hard part of designing good navigation for mobile websites. That\u2019s how we ended up with a majority of websites severing millions of cheap hamburger menus to people every day.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s worse, the damned hamburger crept its way into desktop websites, too! \u201cGood god why?\u201d you might be asking, \u201cThe desktop has enough space for proper navigation.\u201d You\u2019re completely right.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s time to end this design fad that\u2019s hurting people and keeping them from completing their work faster.<\/p>\n

Let the hunger games begin<\/h2>\n

The Nielsen Norman Group<\/a> recently ran a study on hidden menus (also known as hamburger menus). Are they better or worse than visible, regular menus? And how?<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what they found.<\/p>\n

The hamburger menu is worse<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hiding navigation links behind a hamburger icon cuts its discoverability by half. Turns out people don\u2019t see and are less like to use navigation links if they\u2019re collapsed inside a single icon.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s especially interesting, is that they also tend to use navigation much later in their tasks than if it were visible.<\/p>\n

What does this mean?<\/h2>\n

Imagine running a fashion store, like H&M. If you used hidden navigation, people would have trouble finding content (glasses, shirts, bags) because they wouldn\u2019t know where to click to find them. They might use search, but that\u2019s not the ideal user experience you want – because it\u2019s more difficult to ask a search box what the store has on offer, than to just browse around its departments. And this also leads to people having spent more time on their tasks, like finding out how to get to the \u201cbags\u201d section, or trying to locate particular items.<\/p>\n

So, hidden navigation:<\/p>\n