Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Menus
Raised as a usability problem by 26 people on Hacker News over 18 years (2008–2025), in 20 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 27 complaints
- Navigating menu lists with more than 5-6 items is difficult and tedious2025-12-10
- Icons are nearly impossible to tell apart at a glance, forcing users to stop and decipher them2025-12-09
- Icons on every menu item blur together, so items are hard to tell apart2025-12-09
- Items with same or similar icons force reading each entry to tell them apart2025-12-09
- Icons for complex features are hard to read as pictograms, giving unhelpful visual cues in menus2025-12-09
- Floppy disk save icon is meaningless to users who never used floppy disks2025-12-09
- Same functionality uses different icons in each app, so icons don't help users navigate unfamiliar software2025-12-09
- Flat icons are ambiguous, so users can't tell what menu items do2025-12-09
- Features are buried in menus, so mouse navigation is slow to find them2025-03-18
- Users can't tell which menu or dialog holds a feature they know exists2023-11-11
- Menus too tall, become unusable on small or split-screen displays2023-09-20
- Actions hidden behind three-dot icons are hard to discover and remember2023-05-06
- Menu becomes completely unusable for people without JavaScript enabled2022-03-01
- Sea of identical-looking text pull-downs is hard to wade through2019-01-01
- Drilling into deep submenus is frustrating because menus vanish when the mouse slips off2018-12-02
- Users can't tell what the menu button does, causing confusion2018-11-22
- Hidden menu bar forces an extra step, since users cannot see its target before moving the mouse2017-04-01
- Menus make it tedious to find functionality2017-03-02
- Menus are hard to use unless you know the program, and they keep changing between versions2015-01-29
- Having to wade through many menus and submenus to find wanted features2015-01-03
- Settings are hard to find, buried across properties and preferences dialogs in the menus2014-02-22
- Finding menu items and clicking through menus is slow and tedious2012-09-18
- Menus are out of context and annoying to navigate2012-05-28
- Options are hidden in the menu button, so users can't find how to do things2012-01-27
- Hunting for Save or Print in long menus is slower than using shortcuts2011-06-15
- Editing context menus is confusing because the menus are so contextual2011-03-23
- Greyed-out menu options give no explanation of why they are unavailable2008-12-16