Item — HN Reader

> "and it’s consistent with the logic of the progressive disclosure design pattern."

And this is the crucial misinterpretation. Progressive disclosure as defined and used by Xerox is about objects and related actions. And it's all about visible objects! [1]

(Mind the classic example of a square in a drawing application: Clicking the shape discloses editing functions and displays handles to size the object.)

And here is the real problem: The hamburger icon as used today has no other object but the global context. By exposing context to the global context, it's a mere apropos without an object the user might relate to.

When Norm Cox designed the original icon for the Xerox Star user interface, it was a visual anchor for a menu revealing contextual functions to the visible content of the document. (Like selecting rows, etc. [2]) This is notably something else than the global, quite abstract context of a site navigation, disclosing navigational functions to address off-screen content.

Today's hamburger icon is just a paradigmatic misunderstanding.

[1] "A subtle thing happens when everything is visible: the display becomes reality. The user model becomes identical with what is on the screen. Objects can be understood purely in terms of their visible characteristics. Actions can be understood in terms of their effects on the screen. (...) In Star, we have tried to make the objects and actions in the system visible." (Designing the Star User Interface; David Canfield Smith, Byte, Issue 4/1982)

[2] Compare: http://g.recordit.co/8Q5oAYCaVx.gif (Outtake from a ACM CHI 1990 conference video, https://vimeo.com/61556918. Mind that the window-less bar at the top represents the global system as opposed to the document window below and its menu button(s).)

[continued] To put this more clearly:

The hamburger icon/menu introduces a metaphor of its own that is not consistent with progressive disclosure as used elsewhere in common interfaces (see above). It's more a "and here is the rest that you may be missing"-icon that isn't motivated by any consistent notion of the interface, but by concern for screen real estate. As a user, we may not assume the content of the menu, but by empirical knowledge and by considering functions that we are missing and that may be hidden somewhere.

The hamburger menu _is_ the application. It's content may be related to only by expectation and assumptions regarding the extent of the application's basic functionality. Arguably, in the light of this considerations, the icon is communicating rather sparsely what it is and what it does. (Actually, it exposes a global, unrelated view on the basic extent of the app.)

While its use may be arguable for an application (esp. mobile apps), it's highly problematic, when used in web sites and web applications. (The difference: While in the former case it's located rather in the window chrome, thus relating to the viewport as an object, it's part of the view in the latter – like a wormhole to the global context.)