That's OK, we nowadays use icons that don't make sense to anyone at all. I mean how would you know that three horizontal lines was a "Hamburger menu", and if you do know that, why would you want a Hamburger?
Actually the icon looks like three menu items. It is a pretty good icon for signaling that it will open a menu. The hamburger nomenclature seems to be an ex pos facto name for something that rightfully should be called the menu icon.
It's a nondescript icon made of three horizontal bars, it looks like literally anything that comes in threes. My mom calls it the pancake button and my fourteen year-old nephew used to call it the button with something that looks like a fork but without a handle until he switched to the "meh" button once he became a nihilist (teenagers do that stuff sometimes). A menu with three items is very likely to be among the last things that crosses a non-techie's mind.
At this point it's been used enough that anyone with enough exposure to electronics knows what it does, but it's hardly a better choice than the "File" menu. The point of making something intuitive, as opposed to explicit (i.e. by using a symbol as opposed to spelling out) is kindda missed if you need to "well actually" it and explain why it means whatever it means.
I disagree. It took around two years of seeing hamburger menus before it clicked that it was a common symbol for a menu. Its getting worse and seems to be getting replaced by 3 vertical dots now.
I can only speak for myself, but for me who grew up with C64, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, Linux, Windows XP more Linux etc that icon still didn't make sense until I got it explained.
Then again, the magnifykng glass icon for search didn't make sense either until I read the docs but at least back then people made docs and kept the UI stable enough so that it made sense to learn it.
I still remember fondly being good with OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) in a Microsoft Works.
eddieh|6 years ago
alxlaz|6 years ago
It's a nondescript icon made of three horizontal bars, it looks like literally anything that comes in threes. My mom calls it the pancake button and my fourteen year-old nephew used to call it the button with something that looks like a fork but without a handle until he switched to the "meh" button once he became a nihilist (teenagers do that stuff sometimes). A menu with three items is very likely to be among the last things that crosses a non-techie's mind.
At this point it's been used enough that anyone with enough exposure to electronics knows what it does, but it's hardly a better choice than the "File" menu. The point of making something intuitive, as opposed to explicit (i.e. by using a symbol as opposed to spelling out) is kindda missed if you need to "well actually" it and explain why it means whatever it means.
collyw|6 years ago
eitland|6 years ago
Then again, the magnifykng glass icon for search didn't make sense either until I read the docs but at least back then people made docs and kept the UI stable enough so that it made sense to learn it.
I still remember fondly being good with OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) in a Microsoft Works.