The new menu is baffling. It’s missing the things people mostly want, such as Latest. Navigation now takes multiple clicks. I’m getting complaints from users. How do I switch it back? This reminds me of Atlassian.
The tooltip just says “menu” so that’s what I’m calling it.
Latest is a part of Everything - this dynamicaly changes between Latest and Unread. there are also settings for the side bar notifications in the user preferences for sidebar.
if you want, you can add a link to /Latest and /Unread filters for your users in a custom link section that all users can see.
also you can change the tool tip for the hamburger icon to whatever you want in text replacement in js.sidebar.show_sidebar and js.sidebar.hide_sidebar
you can also use text replacement to change the name of “Everything”.
the hamburger icon is the accepted name of that icon for as long as i can remember. it is used in many apps. i have used the term to describe the icon/menu for as long as i have been doing app admin and support, and my users (older, non-tech demographic) have never had a problem with it, often joking about the hamburger menu not being full of food items.
“Hamburger” is developer jargon. The customer-facing name of an icon menu is whatever its tooltip says, but in this case, that’s just “menu,” so there’s another UI / UX issue.
The word “hamburger” does not appear in the Discourse New User Guide, which is good.
According to whom? You seem to strongly think that, but I don’t know where you get this idea from.
IMHO, it is a broadly accepted term, including among users, as @Lillinator already suggested above.
Please do a few web searches around the term, and you’ll see for yourself.
You can have a look at its wikipedia page too: Hamburger button - Wikipedia
If you prefer, you can call it “triple bar” button/menu.
I did a very scientific study consisting of interviewing subjects in two age cohorts (Gen X, Gen Z)[1] Zero percent of those interviewees had heard of the term. When shown an example, the Gen Z cohort responded with “oh, that makes sense”, while the Gen X group found the whole thing even more confusing.
Sample size of one per group. Specifically, my wife and daughter. ↩︎
I appreciated the heads up. The new menu isn’t quite to my taste yet (I appreciated the chunkier look of its predecessor, preferring the two column approach) but definitely has some useful functionality and I appreciate the implementation gets you off the widget API.
Except imho, the slightly clunky “drop down within a drop-down” which covers the other options instead of expanding. Not a fan. Is there a slightly slicker way to achieve a similar thing?
Btw Discourse without the Hamburger would be Paris without the Eiffel tower . I think it’s ok to have some domain specific terms and a bit of personality.
One problem with the term “hamburger menu” is that sometimes it mutates into what I might call “three dots menu”. It’s not a good term, where fashion changes, and people from different age cohorts have different cultural references. Try helping out some people in their 70s and 80s.
Good or bad, it’s there. And that is one reason why familiar solutions should never change without really good reasons — three dots at same place where practically every site uses hamburger is not such reason — it would be a change because of change itself.
Situation would be totally different if layout and ways how to use sites would change drastically.
But… why are we discussing if name hamburger is valid for one menu? I’m bored and procastinating, but what is excuse for all others or you
Documentation should refer to icon menus by their tooltips. E.g. the magnifying glass is Search. To make things clear, you can include the dingbat, e.g. “ (Search)”.
The tooltip for Discourse’s ≡ menu is just “menu,” so you could refer to it as “≡ (menu)”.
I’m a tech writer and part of my job is keeping developer jargon out of customer-facing docs. “Hamburger” for ≡ and “kebab” for ⋮ are jargon.
@craigconstantine@mattdm We’ve recently worked on a solution that adds sidebar compatibility for the category icons theme such that the custom category icons set will be used in the dropdown menu when a category is displayed.
In the long run though, we are discussing internally to make custom category and tag icons a first class Discourse feature. Once that happens, the category icons and tag icons theme components will no longer be required.
Why aren’t the Categories title and the Tag title a link to the relevant pages? That seems like a missed opportunity. If you don’t configure any Tags there is no way to get to the Tags page. That’s not good!
i suspect it’s because in side-bar mode, those headers collapse and expand when clicked. i’ve been thinking about this myself and i would prefer if the headers linked to those pages (categories / tags) and arrows collapse/ expand, but that wouldn’t make sense for the other sidebar section headers (although i suppose Community could just go to the user’s default home page). i guess things can be programmed to be different in hamburger drop down mode, and it does make sense to have those sections linked there.
i’ve also thought that it would a cool option to let users choose between side-bar or drop down mode in their preferences.