Tag: menu

Categories
Design

The Hamburger is Bad for You

Blue monster eating a hamburger

A couple of weeks ago I came across this tweet from Luke Wroblewski:

It asks a the simple question about people’s general understanding of the hamburger icon and links to a larger conversation on Twitter on the topic. If you don’t have the time to read through the 20+ tweets here’s the gist: Anecdotal and somewhat scientific evidence indicates people do not intuitively understand the hamburger icon as an indicator of a menu but have to learn its function. Pardon me as I feign shock and surprise.

A hamburger by any other name…

Did you ever wonder where the hamburger came from? I’m not talking about the incredibly inaccurately named ground-beef-patty-between-too-buns meal option here nor the first use of the hamburger as a symbol for a menu. I’m talking about the actual hamburger icon itself. If you think it was invented by Apple or some genius designer you are about a mile and a half off. The hamburger is actually a symbol known as a “triple bar” used in logic and math to mean absolute equivalence or identical. I have stacks of notebooks full of logic trees and calculations littered with these hamburgers from my philosophy days. And that’s where they should have stayed. Instead this symbol, technically described as “a = sign with a third line”, has become a staple of modern mobile, flat, and no-UI design. The triple bar has become identical to an unintuitive and uninformative user experience. Oh, the irony!

Edit April 8, 2014: According to this article the first known use of the triple bar as a UX icon was on Xerox photocopiers. Thanks to Steve M.G. for the tip!

The Fictional Origins of the Hamburger

For the past week I’ve been theorizing as to the origins of the hamburger as a menu icon. I say “theorizing” because I don’t have the patience nor desire to dig up the actual origin of this idea. Here’s what I imagine happened:

A designer at a company named after a fruit … let’s call it “Pear” … is making a new user interface for the company’s new phone called the oPhone. Said designer discovers that there is very little screen real estate on the oPhone and decides to hide the context menu under an icon. “Hey, Stefan” he shouts across the room to the boss: “What is the universal icon for a menu?” “How would I know Johan” Stefan responds. “Just rip some underused icon from the database like we did with the Abilities button on our keyboard!”

And thus the hamburger was born. (The accuracy of this fictional account is irrelevant).

After its introduction as a menu icon the hamburger has become prevalent throughout the web and in web applications (I can see it in the top right hand corner of Chrome as I write this indicating the settings menu). But the hamburger is also used for several other things in those same applications, most notably to indicate that items in a list are draggable and sortable. Which makes little more sense than its use as an indicator of a menu.

The Meaning of the Hamburger

It’s pretty obvious why the hamburger is meant to indicate a menu: If you really want to it kind of maybe just possibly theoretically might maybe look a little bit like a vertical stack menu. In the same way that the letter ‘L’ looks like a shoe.  The problem of course is that it doesn’t look like a menu unless you already know that it’s supposed to look like a menu. What we have here is a classic case of theory dependence and tacit knowledge: The designer and everyone involved in the application being built know from experience that the hamburger means a menu and thus they assume it’s intuitive. What they fail to remember is that the first time they encountered the hamburger they did not know what it was and had to be told like in the screen grab in Luke’s tweet:

So what does the hamburger look like? Ignoring the actual meaning of the triple bar here is an unordered list of things it does look like:

  • A hamburger
  • Three shelves
  • The jQuery UI accordion
  • The black keys on a keyboard seen from the top at a 90 degree angle
  • A crosswalk
  • … three black lines

In truth the triple bar / hamburger only looks like a triple bar, because that’s what it is. It is only through an incredible feat of skeuomorphism it comes anywhere close to looking like a menu. Which is strange considering the reign of the hamburger was brought on by the move away from sekuomorphism. So the hamburger is really an anti-pattern!

No hamburger for you!

You may have noticed that my designs never feature hamburgers. The theme you are currently looking at has replaced the hamburger for the word “Menu” which in my view is far more descriptive. And when I use icons I try to use ones that indicate actions (arrows, plus or minus, etc) because I am cognizant (I mean “mindful” – gotta stay on trend) of my own theory dependence and work to keep my knowledge focal.

I believe in providing criticism only when it is constructive and I truly wish I could serve up a new and perfect menu icon to solve the hamburger bloat once and for all. Sadly I don’t, at least not yet. In place of this I have a couple of suggestions to curb the desire to use a hamburger as a menu icon:

  1. Try using the word “Menu” instead
  2. Consider using a down arrow or another active icon
  3. Reconsider the menu position and function
  4. Use an off-canvas menu and use a tab with an arrow to indicate active interaction

There is a lot of chatter about the unintuitive nature of the hamburger in UX circles right now and I have no doubt that in due time someone will come up with a new and better icon. It might even be you! In the meantime I urge you to abandon the use of the triple bar as anything other than what it actually is for – logical identical – and find better solutions to your menu woes.

Further reading

Mobile Navigation Menus and Great User Experience – Newfangled

 

Categories
CSS Expression Web News

Pure CSS Drop-Down Menu tutorial – a slight omission

I just got a comment from a reader of my recent Expression Newsletter article The No-Code Way to a Pure CSS Horizontal Drop-Down Menu with Expression Web. He was having trouble getting the grey boxes to “fill out” properly which left the menu looking weird.

A quick review of his CSS told me the problem was he didn’t have the display property set to block. A slight omission for sure but I was more focused on where it originated. A quick read of the paragraph in the article showed me that somewhere in the editing (probably during my rigorous clean-up) this small but important piece of code was ommitted. Which means if people follow the tutorial step by step they’ll run into the same problem.

I’ve already informed the newsletter team of the issue and hopefully they’ll fix it presently. In the meantime, if you’ve run into this problem and you found your way to this blog, here is the full paragraph and the resulting code:

5th paragraph under the heading “Style the links”:

To set the height of the link go to the Block category and set the line-height attribute to 30px to match the height of the ul li style you defined earlier. The reason you are using the line-height attribute instead of the height attribute is that line-height automatically places the text at vertical center. If you were to use height you would have to set the vertical placement manually using padding. To set the width, go to the Position category and set width to 150px to match. Finally, to “fill out” the area with the background colour, go to the Layout category and set display to block.

The resulting code should look like this:

ul li a {
	background-color: #808080;
	color: #FFFFFF;
	width: 142px;
	display: block;
	text-decoration: none;
	line-height: 30px;
	padding-left: 8px;
}

You can find a full working version of the menu here and it’s CSS here for reference.

Categories
CSS Tutorials WordPress

Highlight current page in WordPress menus

I have published an updated tutorial on this topic entitled Highlight Current Page or Category in WordPress 3.0 Menus. Click here to read the new article.

WordPress has a lot of built in functionality that you can tap for advanced customization. One of these which is often ignored is the ability to highlight the current page in menus with CSS. By default, WordPress assigns a special style class to the button that points to the current page. By styling this class differently from the “regular” classes the current page button is highlighted.

In this tutorial we’ll look at how to utilize the built in current page styling, how to create a menu like the one you see above and also how to hard code the functionality into a menu that is not generated dynamically by WordPress.

Identifying the custom styles

If you view the source code of a WordPress blog with a menu like the Reader’s Companion you’ll see that the menu items have been given different classes automatically by the CMS:

The important classes here are page_item which styles all the menu items and current_page_item which is only applied to the current page item. By styling these two classes independently you can get some very nice results. To demonstrate how far you can take this I’ve made a mock-up page that simulates the end output of a WordPress menu with custom styling. You can find it here.

By taking a closer look at the CSS you’ll see that the page_item and current_page_item classes have different styling. The remainder of the code is set up to make the button backgrounds expand and contract in accordance with the Sliding Doors technique from A List Apart.The CSS code on the demo page is identical to the CSS code being used to style the page itself:

page_item styles:

.page_item a {
float: left;
display: block;
background: url("img/right-over.png") no-repeat right top;
padding: 6px 15px 7px 6px;
text-decoration: none;
font-weight: bold;
color: #DDDDDD;
text-transform: uppercase;
}

.page_item a:hover {
color:white;
}

current_page_item styles:

.current_page_item {
float: left;
background: url("img/left-selected.png") no-repeat left top;
margin: 0;
padding: 0 0 0 8px;
}

.current_page_item a, .current_page_item a:hover {
float: left;
display: block;
background: url("img/right-selected.png") no-repeat right top;
padding: 6px 15px 7px 6px;
text-decoration: none;
font-weight: bold;
color: #C7532D;
text-transform: uppercase;
}

If you already have your menu up and running properly, all you need to do is style these two classes and you’ll automatically have the current page highlighted in your menu. But this only applies to dynamic menus generated by WordPress. What happens when you hard code your menus yourself?

Assign dynamic styles to hard-coded menus

To get the same effect when you create a hard-coded menu you need to apply some clever PHP code to each of your menu items.

If you don’t understand what I mean by “hard-coded menu” consider this: By default your menu is called by a function within WordPress that lists all of your pages plus the Home page. This call usually looks something like this:

But this function lists all your pages. If you only want certain pages listed you have to take this function out and create a manual list yourself. This is a hard-coded menu.

To make the current_page_item class apply only to the current page item you need to add a small piece of PHP to each of your menu items. This line of code looks like this:

and is applied inside the li tag of each item. To give a concrete example I have added this code to the list items in the list example at the beginning of this tutorial:

When the page is loaded the PHP script looks to see if the page name matches the name in the is_page section and if it does, the current_page_item class is applied. Therefore the name you put in the is_page section of the PHP script must match the name of the page as created in WordPress exactly. If it does, the current page item will be highlighted dynamically.

I have published an updated tutorial on this topic entitled Highlight Current Page or Category in WordPress 3.0 Menus. Click here to read the new article.

Categories
CSS Expression Web News Tutorials

Read my article in the Microsoft Expression November Newsletter

A month or so ago Microsoft contacted me and asked if I would write an article on Expression Web for their Expression Newsletter. How could I say no to such an opportunity? After some back and forth about the topic I landed on an article on how to create a Pure CSS Drop-Down menu. Over time I’ve encountered numerous solutions, most of which were clunky and didn’t work properly. So the tutorial demonstrates how to create a fully functional CSS-only drop-down menu utilizing the excellent CSS features in Expression Web.

That’s not to say you have to use Expression Web to get something out of the article though. You can follow the tutorial and get the same results even if you’re using Notepad to build your sites. It’s just that Expression Web makes it a hell of a lot easier to manage.

This article comes hot on the heels of my book Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Expression Web 2 in 24 Hours which contains an expanded tutorial on the same topic that also covers a layers-based drop-down menu. If you are an Expression Web 2 user of if you are considering buying or switching over to this excellent web authoring and publishing platform I humbly suggest you pick up a copy for yourself. It’s a quick read and it gives you hour-by-hour instructions on how to create a web site from scratch with the application. And once you’re done, you’ll have a fully working and standards based web site at your disposal. I wrote it as the book I wish someone had written when I started out and from the response I’ve gotten so far people are learning a lot from it. Which is what I set out to do.

If you’re interested in a preview of the kind of content you’ll find in the book or you just want to know how to make a Pure CSS Drop-Down menu, you can read the full article, The No-Code Way to a Pure CSS Horizontal Drop-Down Menu with Expression Web, here or subscribe to the Expression Web Newsletter.