Hamburger menu (☰)

How to read it

Norm Cox designed the icon for the Xerox Star, the office workstation Xerox introduced in 1981. Cox told the software designer Geoff Alday in 2014 that he drew it as a “container” for contextual menu choices, much like the menu that opens today when you click with the right mouse button, and that it was meant to mimic the look of the menu list it opened; he remembered having only 16×16 pixels to draw it in (or possibly 13×13). Writing for Nielsen Norman Group in 2014, Aurora Harley said most interfaces use the three lines for the main navigation menu, while some use the same icon to stand for a list.

Also searched as: ☰, hamburger icon, hamburger menu, menu icon, three lines icon.

What usability testing found

Nielsen Norman Group’s 2016 study by Kara Pernice and Raluca Budiu compared hidden menus, such as those behind a hamburger icon, with navigation shown on the page. Hidden navigation was less discoverable, people used it less often and later in a task, and the effect was larger on desktop computers than on phones.

Look-alikes

Three dots stacked in a column is the Kebab menu (⋮), a “more” button. The Australian eSafety Commissioner’s Be Connected icon guide labels the three lines “Menu” and the dots “More menu”. The character ☰ that is often typed for the hamburger is, in Unicode, the trigram for heaven, one of the eight trigrams of the Yijing.