November 12, 2014

Apple’s Official Hamburger Menu iOS control – iOS 9 beta 0.9

iOS Hamburger Menu Controller

I have been having this argument with a client for over five months, now.  I guess sometimes ‘…but everyone else on the planet is doing it’ is a hard argument to overcome.  It really says something about Apple that they don’t do what others are doing.  Rather, they do what they feel is the absolute best way to do things.  So take your usability studies and throw them out the window…

check out the 2014 WWDC video entitled “Designing Intuitive User Experiences” (you can access all the 2014 WWDC videos here: https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/).  At 32:30 he covers the dreaded Hamburger Menu topic.  Throughout the video before that he talks about how to structure navigation in an intuitive manner.  If nothing else, this screenshot says it all:

iOS Hamburger Menu Controller

iOS Hamburger Menu Controller. It doesn’t exist – for a reason!

Hamburger Menu is NOT an iOS control for a reason.
In fact, they go on to say that Apple typically does NOT give design advice about our apps, but in this one case they make an exception!
Furthermore, the example he uses in his talk is actually a banking app – so it’s not like banking / financial apps are the one good use case for hamburger menus.
—
update: there’s a really nice transcript of the hamburger menu section of the talk here.

Fuad Kamal

With a background in biotechnology, Fuad began his career developing assays and cutting edge technologies around HIV research. From there he shifted into the bioinformatics arena, where he developed innovative information systems in Perl. He started playing with the Flash platform around the time Flash 4 was released, and later developed the flash interface for the Flight Information Display System (FIDS) that you see at pretty much every major airport around the world today. Fuad loves delving into new technologies and pushing technologies in novel directions. Currently he is focused on providing mobile strategy & development for the Health & Fitness markets. He is an iOS developer, teaches an Android & Kotlin college course, and is currently writing The Kotlin Book http://thekotlinbook.com. Fuad has often applied principals he learned from his study of the martial arts to mentoring others as well as taking a unique approach to problem solving. He has found that quite often, the barriers we set before us are more mental than anything else, and the key to overcoming them lies in understanding this concept.

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