Hi, I'mUdi Batbayar

Last time, I talked about how Amazon and Google famously keep hamburger menus on their mobile apps as opposed to the popular bottom navigation bars. Well, Gmail and the main Amazon app have made some changes and gained navigation bars since then so I wanted to talk about those changes and postulate on the intended steps there, and how it has affected the users.

As designers nowadays have conceded, the ubiquitousness of hamburger menus over time in products as well-known and used as often as Google and Amazon means that we can't exactly throw the baby out with the bathwater. If users know it, and if users know what to expect from it, having hamburger menus at all is an affordance and a tool that we can use. But given it's negative impact on discoverability, the question becomes who can afford to use it?

A significant number of us are actively trying to keep ourselves well-informed about the news, but failing- it takes time and dedication. Even if news articles are read, a study from NNGroup found that 72% of articles are scanned. From a UX point of view, one could argue that there's a failing in user engagement and we as designers could work to encourage that initial curiosity.

As experts try to convince the world to buckle in for rounds 2 and 3 of COVID-19, we become increasingly dependent on the digital world. But as the digital world becomes even more essential, one has to ask if we're adequately preparing our senior population for this dependence?

With COVID-19 just reaching it's peak of the first wave, we may need to start rethinking and redesigning our public spaces- to encourage social distancing, to decrease contact with surfaces, and to make it as intuitive as possible for a quick and easy interaction. As a UX designer, I thought I could take a moment to zero in and focus on touch displays: more specifically the public ones that are used daily, like ATMs and public transport vending machines.