Tech Friday: The overused Hamburger Menu for desktop apps

Posted By on September 6, 2019

HamburgerButton_WikiPerhaps it is just me, but I’m growing tired of the software development trend to make every piece of software resemble a smartphone app. I spend a significant amount of time using a desktop computer with plenty of display real estate, yet apps and webpages are all trying to make their mobile apps, notebook computer apps and desktop versions all look the same.

One of the newly adopted trends is the hamburger menu or icon that preserves space on phones as a pop-up file menu, but now shows up regularly even on desktop programs and websites.

The example from ComputerHope.com below is of a Mozilla Firefox browser  and is used to shrink or hide the menu options. Although just having the Hamburger menu icon is not a big deal to me, but the trend to reduce the amount of information displayed on a large screen is not my preference. It would be nice to include more information on our “large screens” rather than force desktop users to the amount of data that fits on a phone or tablet device. I have a large display … how about designing pages and programs that fit it?

HamburgerMenu

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