Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Pie menus
Raised as a usability problem by 7 people on Hacker News over 10 years (2016–2025), in 4 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 7 complaints
- Pie menus clash with left-to-right, top-to-bottom reading habits, so they are an anti-pattern2025-06-24
- Pie menus are unfamiliar, fit text poorly, and are hard to navigate by keyboard2024-01-31
- Items are hard to read and click because the eye must follow a circle, and angles are easy to miss2024-01-31
- Rotated text is hard to read because you must turn your head2018-05-19
- Hard to scan options because there is no clear left-to-right reading sequence2018-05-19
- Icons must be self-explanatory, and new or infrequent users can't tell what options mean2018-05-18
- Hard to scan and memorize item positions on circular pie menus2016-03-05