Hamburger menu
In marketing, a hamburger menu is often not about a juicy burger. You can recognize a hamburger menu by its icon, which consists of three horizontal bars one below the other.The icon is often in the upper right corner of a responsive website or app on your screen. In some cases, the hamburger menu is in combination with the words "menu" or "go to.
The hamburger menu icon indicates that the website's menu can be found there. These are quick links to other pages or posts of the Web site. When a visitor clicks on the hamburger menu, the window flips open to display the website's menu.
Hamburger menu or not?
The hamburger menu was introduced to save screen space on smartphones and tablets. Whether or not you want to apply a hamburger menu to your website or app depends on the following aspects:
- How extensive your application, site or menu is - If the website doesn't have super many categories, a hamburger menu might be unnecessary
- Target audience - There are still relatively many people who are not quite familiar with a hamburger menu. Suppose your target audience falls into this group, it is better to have a section visible
In addition to tablets and smartphones, more and more desktop sites are using a hamburger menu. Some sites have a navigation bar that lists site locations in conjunction with a hamburger menu. Or they use the hamburger menu to provide additional options beyond the main pages listed on the navigation bar. By putting the "menu" items in the hamburger menu, you keep more space for relevant information about the page. This, on the other hand, can be good for the readability and SEO of the website. So it really depends on who you are targeting and what you want to offer.
Burger menu functionality
Designers and developers sometimes assume that visitors do understand what the hamburger menu means. This is often not quite the case. A lot of confusion arises because the icon is used in multiple ways in Web design. For example, in some applications, the icon is a way to move things around on a list. An A/B test can be used to see what works better on your Web site. Change the icon with the word "menu" to compare the click ratio. This way you can find what suits your website visitors.
