Hi, this is Nathalie Walpole, web and graphic designer with Tiny Frog Technologies and today I’ll be talking about hamburger menus. Now I think we’ve started to see a lot of these as a trend on mobile devices. I’ll show you an example here. If you are on a mobile device and viewing certain websites, you will see this icon at the top with 3 little lines. That’s called a hamburger menu. When you click on it, it will expand the navigation bar menu and you can click to go into an interior page.
Now, although hamburger menus work really well on mobile devices, a lot of designers have started putting them on desktop website designs. Unfortunately, they don’t work as nicely on desktop designs. For a graphic designer, it cleans things up because it hides items behind the menu, but it is not user-friendly. This is a very important consideration.
For example, say you visit this site on a tablet or desktop device. You don’t see a navigation bar. Without seeing the bar, some people will see the hamburger menu and click on it. If the visitor is perhaps part of an older demographic, they may not know that you need to click on this button. If you enter the menu, you may not know how to go back on the website. If you click on the “x” symbol, it will take you back. But had I not known that, I would have just clicked out of this website and moved onto the next website. Hamburger menus are great for mobile devices. They are not quite as good on a desktop device in terms of user experience.
If you have any questions about the latest design trends and how to use them effectively on your website, feel free contact us.