Universal Icons are something that you know about and may not have known you knew. Think about some of these icons. The symbol of a house, an arrow pointing to the right, a Holmesian magnifying glass, a heart, a hand with the thumb pointing up or down and many, many more. You have it; the house is the home icon to go to the home page or the start page of an app. The right arrow is the play button for audio or video. The next one is the search function, the like or love icon, your agreement or disagree with something shown. By-the-way, these are part of UX or UXD. User eXperience or User eXperience Design to make things easier on us, the users.
Thinking about those few UX icons think about this. It is that time of year for cooking out. Friends, family, hotdogs, steaks, corn on the cob, hamburgers, and more. But getting back on topic, I had a question this week about the three horizontal lines that are found in many applications today. Those lines or bars are found on computer and phone apps alike.
Use your imagination a little and you will see the three lines can represent the top and bottom of a hamburger bun with the burger in between part of UXD. OK, geeks are strange, but that is what it is called. Sometime you may see it represented as three dots one over the other.
Norm Cox, a graphics designer for an old computer system made during that era, is the creator of the hamburger. He came out with it in 1981…quite a while back. However, it was not used much until phone apps started rolling out.
It is a small icon with much meaning. If you look at it again, it also looks like a list of three items. This is appropriate as it is the menu icon shortcut that allows you to access the controls of the application it is in. When you click the hamburger items are listed. There may only be a couple of menu items available or many. All programs have whatever they need on their menu. Notice next time you are on your phone or computer and you will see it hiding, usually in the right or left upper corner of the app screen.
I have seen some phone apps that have both on one screen for different controls. Check the graphic on the XXXX. It show my phone browser when I visit my site. The top dotted hamburger is for the browser menu. The one below it will show the menu for GrayHaired.Tech.
Each app may “present” them differently. Sometimes you click the hamburger and it drops down a menu, other times it may open a box of items, the menu may slide in from the side of the screen, and occasionally a new window will open with choices for you to make.
Enjoy your summer hamburgers! Next week, a discovery I made a couple of weeks ago and why I needed it. Stay tuned.
