#Screeny chrome how to#

(Even on small screens, hiding the navigation under a hamburger menu is not ideal: out of sight is out of mind and people do take a little more to discover it. The content-to-chrome ratio is too small, so it makes sense to try to increase it by hiding some of the functionality under a menu button. On a tiny screen, a navigation bar with 8 items easily consumes more than half the available screen space it can displace content and make users scroll to get a sense of what the page is about. And that ratio is modulated by the screen size. What we need to maximize is not the amount of content on a screen instead, we need to maximize the content-to-chrome ratio.

Too much chrome is bad, but too little chrome is bad too. The audio settings are under the Call menu: users need to click twice to access it.

#Screeny chrome how to#

To access the audio settings, users need to click 3 times (and also recall how to expose the Windows charms): first click the right corner of the screen to uncover the Windows 8 charms, then on Settings, and finally on Options (not pictured). Of course, you may say - what’s one extra click? Most of the time it’s not much in itself, but it can quickly become annoying if users must repeatedly access those hidden options.

For a hamburger menu, they must first click the menu icon, and then select the option that they need, instead of just clicking on a navigation choice right away. Even if they discover and remember how to access the chrome, users suffer an increased interaction cost to access the functionality provided by the chrome.In our Windows 8 testing we often saw users discovering how to access the chrome, and then forgetting all about it later on. Exposing the navigation options favors recognition over recall, and thus follows one of the 10 usability heuristics.

Even after they’ve discovered the chrome, users must recall how to access it later during the same session.Whether that chrome is hidden under a generic menu button, or under a gesture (as in Windows 8 for touchscreens), people must think to look under that button or perform the gesture in order to uncover the chrome. Hiding the chrome incurs a substantial cost for the users: Truth is that chrome supports how users engage with that content and determines whether a site is useful or not. So, if that’s the case, is hiding the chrome bad? Cost of Hiding the Chrome Of course, users go to a website to engage with the content and not to admire the clever UI, so content is ultimately the king. Our recent analysis of homepages noted that chrome and navigation tend to get a smaller share of the homepage nowadays compared with 12 years ago.īehind this antichrome movement stands the mobile-inspired assumption that we should prioritize content over chrome.

The hamburger menu is just one incarnation of the current trend to downplay the chrome (UI elements such as buttons, menus, and other widgets) on the desktop. The hamburger menu in Firefox hides all the regular menu options and it replaces the old menu bar at the top of the window. His annoyance had been triggered by the new desktop version of Firefox that “copies the Chrome browser” and hides the menu options under a hamburger icon. One of our readers recently sent us a message complaining about the recent trend of “ horrible menuless windows,” which he compared with cars where all dashboard functions were hidden in the glove-box compartment.