Now, the hamburger menu has become the icon that designers love to hate. Since then, the hamburger menu has become the go-to icon for apps and websites to drop in their navigation buttons. It was only when UX designers had to find a way to fit a multitude of buttons onto the tiny screens of our phones that the menu started re-appearing everywhere. “It’s somewhat equivalent to the context menu we use today when clicking over objects with the right mouse button.”Īfter the Xerox Star, though, the hamburger menu stayed quiet. “I designed that symbol many years ago as a container for contextual menu choices,” Cox said in a 2014 interview. While we use hamburger menus today in order to ease up the navigation experience, the purpose of the original hamburger menu was different. It was created by interaction designer Norm Cox for the Xerox Star personal workstation in 1981 as an easy way to communicate to users that the button contained a list of items.

The hamburger menu, or the hamburger icon, is the button in websites and apps that typically opens up into a side menu or navigation drawer. Lettuce dive into the hamburger menu now and help you ketchup to the meaty history surrounding this bun-tton. For others, it’s a confusing byproduct of bad information architecture. For some, it’s an essential part of the designer’s toolkit. And much like its real-life counterpart, the hamburger menu is a space-saving mechanism.īut it’s an icon that’s em broiled in controversy.

Its delicious name comes from its design: it’s comprised of three horizontal lines resembling, well, a hamburger. The hamburger menu is a navigation element you can find on websites, apps, and programs.

The burger stack menu