Hamburgers and Toast Notifications: A story of broken UX on Windows 10 Mobile

Windows 10 Mobile has a pretty annoying issue with hamburgers and toast notifications. As you may know, many Windows 10 Mobile apps from Microsoft (and other third-party developers) don’t have a swipe-to-open hamburger menu — which is quite annoying to start. This means, everytime you want to open the hamburger menu, you have to reach out to the top of your device’s screen to open the hamburger. Now, this gets even worse when you get a toast notification and want to open the hamburger menu. This is because the toast notification literally blocks the hamburger menu button in many apps. Sure, it’s not a major issue, but it’s definitely a very annoying one.

[shunno-quote align=”right”]Windows 10 Mobile desperately needs swipe-to-open hamburger menus[/shunno-quote]

To be fair though, Microsoft can’t really do anything about this, and you may also experience the same issue on your Android smartphone or on an iPhone. However, unlike Android and iOS apps, many Windows 10 Mobile apps do not include a swipe-to-open hamburger menu. If the apps had a swipe-to-open hamburger menu, it would be a lot easier to open the hamburger menu, even when annoying toast notifications get in the way. This is something a lot of users and developers have been asking for, and Microsoft is yet to add this to Windows 10 Mobile. The company’s Groove Music team implemented their own swipe-to-open hamburger menu (which, to be honest, is quite rough), and some third-party developers such as Slack and Readit implemented this on their apps too. However, it would be a lot better if Microsoft had a built-in Control, or something similar to that which allows developers to easily implement swipe-to-open hamburger menus on Windows 10 Mobile.

Microsoft will hopefully address this issue with Redstone 2 since the company’s major focus is expected to be on Windows 10 Mobile next year. Windows Phone always had an exceptional user-interface and a very good user experience — with Windows 10 Mobile, it seems like Microsoft didn’t put enough effort into designing the OS, and actually thinking about the user experience. Redstone 2 will hopefully address all these issues, but for now, we just have to deal with these annoying toast notifications blocking the hamburger.