User Interface (UI) concepts: The classic Menubar and Toolbar / Menu bar or part of W.I.M.P. design. WIMP computing denoting a style of interaction using elements of the user interface providing mouse-operated toolbars and menus to access its functions.
The menubar and toolbar provides unobtrusive dirct access to all the commands in an application while remaining out of the way of the core application work space. This allows for convenient execution for experts while providing guidance and education for novices. Exploring the menubar is how users learned about an application.
The Decline of Usability
The classic Menubar / Menu Bar and Toolbar are being replaced by newer UI design elements such as:
- Ribbon
- Hamburger Menu
These modern replacements are not better, just different. The Ribbon menu was a studied attempt at being more efficient. The Google Hamburger Menu is a way to address different mentalities or the lazy lack of menu exploration enthusiasm in millennial and younger generations.
Quoted from an article by carl svensson, "Another apparently unfashionable UI standard is the menu bar. It used to be a lowest common denominator between platforms and, when still present, it works basically the same on Windows, Mac and Unix-likes. For the most part, it even keeps the traditional "File, Edit, View" approach to things. The Gnome designers, however, have decided that such menus are apparently a bad feature and they should probably never have been used in the first place. To rectify more than three decades of such folly, they have created... something I'm not sure what to call."
"One of the tricks up their sleeve is the hamburger menu. On smartphones, it's a great feature, but on the desktop, it's unnecessary: If there's anything we have on today's wide screen displays, it's horizontal space. In Gnome, it seems to be a catch-all for UI operations that didn't end up somewhere else."
Classic Menu Bar
Sometimes spelled as one word, menubar, and sometimes two, menu bar, this is the classic graphical control element which contains drop-down menus. The menu bar's purpose is to supply a common set of menus which provide access to such functions as opening files, interacting with an application, or displaying help documentation or manuals. Menu bars are typically present in graphical user interfaces that display documents and representations of files in windows and windowing systems but menus can be used as well in command line interface programs like text editors or file managers where drop-down menu is activated with a shortcut or combination key.
The Unity desktop shell shipped with Ubuntu Linux since version 11.04 uses a Macintosh-style menu bar; however, it is hidden unless the mouse pointer hovers over it. Other window managers and desktop environments use a similar scheme, where programs have their own menus, but clicking one or more of the mouse buttons on the root window brings up a menu containing, for example, commands to launch various applications or to log out.
Hidden Classic Menu Bar
Applications like Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer 7, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox 4 in Windows and Linux, have effectively removed the menu bar altogether by hiding it until a key is pressed. These applications present options to the user contextually, typically using hyperlinks to select actions.
Dreaded Hamburger Menu
The menu that is a button typically placed in a top corner of a graphical user interface. Its function is to toggle a menu or navigation bar between being collapsed behind the button or displayed on the screen. The icon which is associated with this widget, consisting of three horizontal bars, is also known as the collapsed menu icon. The "menu" button takes the form of an icon that consists of three parallel horizontal lines. The name refers to its resemblance to the menu that is typically exposed or opened when interacting with it.
In the Microsoft Office 365 platform, a similar application menu consisting of three rows of three squares is displayed as a variation to the hamburger menu. It has been proven that while the collapsed menu button is now commonplace, its functionality is not necessarily immediately obvious when first encountered. The hamburger menu increases interaction cost compared to a bottom bar menu, requiring extra clicks to retrieve the same information.
Gnome Application menus or app menus
Application menus or app menus are the menus that you see in the GNOME 3 top bar, with the name and icon for the current app. All GNOME applications will have to move the items from its app menu to a menu inside the application window. Primary menu is the menu you see in the header bar and has the icon with three stacked lines, also referred to as the hamburger menu. If an application fails to remove the application menu by the release of GNOME 3.32, it will be shown in the app’s header bar, using the fallback UI that is already provided by GTK. For apps like Nautilus and Web, which aren’t multi-paged, the hamburger menu will show both global and window-specific actions, separated by a horizontal dividing line.