Apologies if this should have been posted in the Beta forum.
This isn’t about the hamburger menu icon. This is about the user journey after they’ve clicked on the hamburger menu icon.
Let me try to better explain with illustrations. Imagine this is the full site menu layout:
When the mobile visitor clicks the hamburger menu, this is what they initially see:
If they click on the text of the top-level menu link, they are taken to that page. They do not get to see the child links. In fact, they may never realize the child pages exist.
If they click on the top level menu submenu indicator, they’re taken to the submenu list but they no longer see the parent link.
This behavior isn’t intuitive.
Users don’t intuitively know that clicking on text and sub-menu indicators do different things. Nor is this behavior what users experience on other sites (if you’re not already familiar, look up Jakob’s Law on Google)
What would be better from a UX, UI, and customer journey point of view would be for the user to click anywhere on the parent link, and see the parent and all associated child links in the same view:
Clicking
anywhere on the parent or child link would take them to the appropriate page. Clicking on a
different top-level menu parent link would open-up the parent and child links for that particular section (maybe optionally closing the previous parent/child view, to minimize viewport real estate). Multi-nested child pages would work in the same way.
Yes, that would mean having to click twice on a parent page to view that page. But since there’s a visual change after the first click (i.e. opening up the child submenu) I don’t see it as an issue.
What do you think?
