UX glossary · engl. Hamburger Menu
Hamburger Menu
The hamburger menu is an icon made of three horizontal lines that hides the navigation of a website or app. It saves space but makes content harder to find.
Imagine you open a bike shop’s website on your phone to check the opening hours. You see a logo, a large photo and three horizontal lines in the top right corner. Whether the opening hours are hiding behind them, you won’t know until you tap.
Those three lines are the hamburger menu.
Explained simply
The hamburger menu is an icon made of three stacked lines that hides the navigation of a website or app. It gets its name because the lines look like a bun, a patty and another bun. Think of it as a drawer: everything is neatly tucked away, but you have to know or guess that the drawer exists and then pull it open.
The icon is older than many people think. Designer Norm Cox created it for the interface of the Xerox Star, a workstation released in 1981, where it opened a list of additional commands. It spread on smartphones from around 2009 onward, because small screens leave little room for visible navigation.
What research shows
The upside is obvious: the menu saves space. The downside is just as clear: what you can’t see gets used less. In 2016, the Nielsen Norman Group studied how people deal with hidden navigation. On desktop, participants used hidden navigation in 27 percent of cases and visible navigation in 48 percent. On mobile, the gap was smaller but still there: 57 percent for hidden navigation versus 86 percent for a combination of visible and hidden items. Tasks with hidden navigation also took longer and were rated as more difficult.
That doesn’t mean the hamburger menu is always wrong. It means your most important paths shouldn’t live only inside it. You can read more in The 4 Most Frequently Asked Questions About the Hamburger Menu.
An example
Back to the bike shop. Before, every page sits inside the hamburger menu, including opening hours and repair bookings, the two most common reasons people visit. Many scroll around without success and end up calling instead.
After, “Book a repair” and “Opening hours” appear as visible links right below the logo. Less frequent pages like jobs or the legal notice stay in the menu. The icon also gets the label “Menu”, so people who don’t recognize it still know what’s behind it.
In practice
- Show what matters most. Use data or user research to find the two to four most common goals and put them in plain sight.
- Label the icon. The word “Menu” next to the three lines takes up little space and removes doubt. For screen readers, the button also needs a clear accessible name.
- Skip it on desktop. There’s usually enough room for visible navigation there, and the study found the downside of hidden menus to be largest on desktop.
Related terms
Information Architecture, Progressive Disclosure, Affordance, Mental Model