Hamburger Menu: Does it change viewing behavior?
The Challenge:
This month and a half long project during my summer internship explored the use of the hamburger menu on desktop websites, giving insight into how different menu systems could help drive the sales of a product or service.
Duration:
One and a half month for my internship at DeveloperTown
What I Did:
Usability testing with eye
tracking technology
Interviewing
The Takeaway:
If you would like people that come to website to stay and browse, the hamburger menu navigation seems to be the best to do this.
If people come to your website wanting to do quick actions (e.g. checking a bank account balance or transferring money), a static navigation menu seems to be the best fit.
It Started With A Question:
"Does behavior change when users encounter the hamburger menu on a desktop website versus a more traditional menu?"
My supervisor, Randy Fisher, and I had tossed around ideas of how hamburger menus are being used on desktop websites, with hamburger menus popping up more frequently. We then set in motion an eye tracking study to explore how different website menus influenced browsing behavior.
The Study:
Using the Eye Tribe's eye tracking hardware and software, I formulated a study to answer that question. Over the course of a month, I conducted the study with 25 people. The study paired two methods together: an eye tracking portion and a follow-up interview.
The eye tracking portion had the participants doing the same tasks on 2 different versions of the same website, one having a hamburger menu and the other having a static navigation menu.
hAMBURGER mENU
Static Nav Menu
Tasks were given to participants to complete and they were as follows:
- Open a message
- Compose a new message
- Access settings (to change layout)
- Find and access a conversation thread (which didn’t exist in viewing area)
After running the participants through the eye tracking portion of the test, I would follow up with a short interview, asking:
- When did you find that content was accessible?
- When do you think it’s appropriate to use the hamburger menu?
- Where do you see the hamburger menu the most?
- Why do you think that is?
These questions were used to gauge how people reacted to the hamburger navigation and to see where they perceived the hamburger menu to be the most likely to pop up. This gave me insight into what value the hamburger menu offered to people, while also getting a feel for what other kinds of uses these menus provided that I may have missed.
Core Methods:
Exemplar Comparison
I looked into a lot of websites to see what type of menu system they were using, while also comparing the purposes/uses of these websites, too. This was helpful because it helped with the formulation of the insight that was gained out of this study.
Usability Testing
Having people run through the task sequence was helpful to generate heat maps of the eye movements. Doing pilot tests helped me work out how to handle any calibration errors. The more tests I did, I was able to also work out my introduction to the test and the guidance in the test as well.
Interviews
The follow-up interview gave me more rich information that just doing eye tracking by itself. The eye tracking setup I used only gave me heatmaps of where people were looking on the screen. By pairing these tests with interviews, I was able to find out that most people associated the hamburger menu with mobile devices and that people were confused at what to click on when presented with a hamburger menu for navigating a website. Once this information was given to me, I assigned values to what people said during these interviews, leading to the formulation of the insight.
My Reflection:
This project gave me a better feel for what being "flexible" means. I learned to be flexible after being thrust into a position where I knew nothing about eye tracking technology. Learning how to use the hardware and software was difficult at first, never having used this technology before. I found that eye tracking technology itself only gives you one kind of data. I found through a couple pilot studies that I needed to find another method of getting more meaningful information and through that, I found that interviews did
this for me.
During this whole process, I singlehandedly had to find and test participants; I recruited people in the office who had no connection to what I was doing, as well as people I am connected with over social media. Having gone through that, it made me really appreciate everyone's time because scheduling these tests got difficult due to some people not showing up/canceling. In moments like these, I found, you just have to persevere, keep on trying and tweak things as you go.
The full write-up can be found here: http://www.developertown.com/hamburger-menu/