18
My client insisted on a hamburger menu with 15 items and I couldn't talk them out of it
A product manager at a startup I worked with in Denver told me users love hidden menus because they look clean, but our analytics showed the main action buttons got less than 2% engagement after we launched. Has anyone else had a similar fight over navigation patterns that just didn't work?
2 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In2 Comments
kai_stone9917d ago
Yeah, the clean look thing is a trap though... hamburger menus actually test worse for discoverability than visible navigation. A study from the Nielsen Norman Group showed users miss about half the items in hidden menus compared to visible tabs. So your analytics weren't lying, that 2% engagement rate tracks with what they found.
4
henderson.hugo17d ago
Our test group with actual users literally got lost trying to find the "contact us" button buried under three layers of hamburger menu (I think they ended up just googling our support number instead). That Nielsen Norman Group study totally backs up what we saw - we were basically hiding our best content behind a digital wall. I once spent 45 minutes explaining to a client why 15 menu items in a hamburger is basically a restaurant menu with no pictures, just words, and nobody reads that. At this point I'm pretty sure my career is just me saying "I told you so" to analytics reports six months later.
2