05 — Design Mag
The Woman Who Deleted the Hamburger Menu
Ingrid Falk ripped the hamburger menu out of a banking app used by nine million people, watched support tickets fall by a third, and got called reckless on the way. A conversation about navigation, courage and what discoverability actually means.
Ingrid Falk was a principal designer at a European bank when she committed what one VP called "an act of vandalism against our information architecture": she deleted the hamburger menu. Everything behind it either earned a place in a four-item tab bar or was cut. We asked her how it went.
A conversation with Ingrid Falk
- Design Mag
Nine million users, and you removed their menu. What did you know that everyone else didn't?
- Ingrid Falk
I knew the menu's analytics, which nobody had looked at in four years. Eleven items. Two of them accounted for 96% of all taps. Four had never been tapped by more than a rounding error of humans. We weren't hiding features in that drawer — we were burying them, and paying an interface tax to do it.
- Design Mag
The classic defence is that the hamburger scales. You can always add one more item.
- Ingrid Falk
That's not a defence, that's the indictment. A navigation pattern whose main property is that it never forces a decision is a machine for postponing strategy. The tab bar is honest: four slots, fight for them. The fight is the product decision. The drawer lets you skip the fight, so everyone skips it, forever.
- Design Mag
Support tickets fell by a third. Did anything get worse?
- Ingrid Falk
Absolutely. We cut a currency calculator that eleven thousand people quietly loved, and they wrote to us with feeling. We brought it back inside the transfers flow, where it should have been all along. That's the part nobody tells you — deleting navigation doesn't just reorganise the app, it surfaces what the app actually is. Some of the anger is grief, and some of it is information.
- Design Mag
What would you say to a designer staring at their own hamburger right now?
- Ingrid Falk
Pull the tap data before you pull the menu. You can't win the argument with taste — hamburgers are defended by org charts, not by users. Every item in that drawer has a director who put it there. The analytics are how you make it a maths problem instead of a turf war.
A pattern whose main property is that it never forces a decision is a machine for postponing strategy.
— Ingrid Falk