Interesting collection. Between the veritable homages (AV notification included) [0] and reinterpretations for various purposes (e.g., music player [1]), it's a fun mix!
It also reminded me of the Nielsen Norman article exploring flat design and comparing it to three-dimensional design [2]. While it's becoming less and less possible, it would be interesting to compare the experience across different UX patterns for first-time computer users. It seems hard to separate familiarity and nostalgia from truly superior UX.
These are interesting resources, thank you. One sentence stuck out to me in [2]:
> Early pseudo-3D GUIs and Steve-Jobs-esque skeuomorphism often produced heavy, clunky interfaces.
I think that this is an aesthetic assessment, not one that speaks to usability. And while older interfaces were aesthetically clunky, newer interfaces are functionally clunky - often hiding functionality (hamburger menu) and wasting content space in exchange for the whitespace necessary to separate elements without skeuomorphic signifiers.
I think the Hamburger was a good solution to a real problem: that mobile phones simply have less screen space (physical, if not in pixels) than desktops and laptops. The problem is that people then seem to blindly apply the solutions where they aren't needed. Too much cargo culting, not enough thought.
Early Android devices had a hardware menu button, press it, get a menu, simple and consistent. It can be related to the menu bar in desktop applications.
Android 3 and 4 broke it. Google noticed that many apps didn't know what to do with that button, and when they stopped relying on physical buttons, instead of trying to make things more consistent, they simply threw it the towel and removed the button. The hamburger menu replaced it. But unlike the physical button, it can be anywhere, or absent, or hidden behind a swipe gesture, or whatever the "UX designer" thought of.
Normally, the way you do it in a desktop app is to use the OS provided menu bar, preferably with standard labels like "File", "Edit", "View" and "Help". But in a web page, you can't do that, the menu bar is property of the browser, and because HTML never standardized menus, you take inspiration from where you can, and already messy mobile apps is the closest thing you have.
The problem is that now, people design their desktop apps like web pages, in fact, with Electron and the like, they are web pages. So every OS convention and standard widgets that help make things consistent go out of the window (pun not intended).
I think Google - which is at core a web company - couldn't consider mobile apps alone. By having an hardware button, apps and websites inevitably worked differently. Removing the button allowed for uniformity: everyone uses the hamburger.
Unfortunately, in the new post-hamburger menu Android, the options that used to be available in the hamburger menu are now even harder to find. When they're still available in the main screen, they're also less useful--you have no idea what they do until you use them (I know I can long press, but family can't).
The best app UI I've seen, FBReader, has a menu, a drawer, and an action bar, and you can move elements between all three of them through settings, and for normal reading use the UI is hidden altogether. If you want to do anything advanced, it gets more difficult though--it has nested menus, though they're well organized IMO. Another UI that I like is Perfect Viewer's tap zones--it has settings for 3, 5, 11 tap zones on screen, and you can set what happens separately for long-press, single and double tap in each zone, plus swipe the top for brightness and bottom for progress control (like dragging a scrollbar, but for ebooks); probably overkill for most people though.
Microsoft tends to use the waffle menu for switching between apps, and many of those apps will have a hamburger menu at various screen sizes. Some of those apps will also have ellipsis menus in various places, and that leads to my favorite of the silly food names for menu icons as these are often called qebab menus, especially the vertical ellipsis which is rare in text but common for menu icons so some people don't even realize they are meant to be ellipses, but they definitely look like a skewer of qebabs.
(ETA: Also yes, it is sort of weird that Microsoft feels a need for three levels of menus: waffle, hamburger, qebab. Though in practice it seems better than the Android apps I've seen with 2+ Hamburger menus. Which one is which? Which one does what? The hierarchy of waffle, hamburger, qebab offers some context.)
Thanks for posting the last article. I recently found an interesting post from Jeff Atwood about the Uncanny Valley of User Interfaces (2008)[1] where he explains how web apps that mimic desktop UI conventions is rarely a good idea.
It also reminded me of the Nielsen Norman article exploring flat design and comparing it to three-dimensional design [2]. While it's becoming less and less possible, it would be interesting to compare the experience across different UX patterns for first-time computer users. It seems hard to separate familiarity and nostalgia from truly superior UX.