by DonHopkins | 2025-05-29 12:26:12+00:00
I hate on Jakob Nielsen for recommending pizza menus over pie menus and hamburger menus! ;)

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menu-vs-pizza/

Not that I have anything against pizza menus, though -- they do have their place. But we both agree to hate hamburger menus passionately. ("Hate the menu, not the burger.")

PizzaTool: How I accidentally ordered my first pizza over the internet:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-...

Seriously though, I've always been a huge fan of Jakob Nielsen, especially for his empirical approach, and he has even said some nice things about pie menus.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29930500

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/trip-report-chi-88/

>Some new stuff was presented such as the pie menus studied by Callahan, Hopkins, Weiser, and Shneiderman from the University of Maryland. When used as pop-up menus, pies have the advantage that any menu item can be selected by equally small movements of the mouse and the study did indeed show that users performed about 15% faster using a pie menu than using a linear menu. Pie menus also have some potential disadvantages, especially when used with many menu items or in cases that call for hierarchical pop-ups.

>In spite of this and some other novelty items, the main feel of CHI'88 was that of improvements of earlier stuff rather than revolutionary new discoveries. Every year, I am able to summarize the main theme of a CHI conference and this year I am not in doubt that the theme was that we are currently slowed down to steady, evolutionary progress in the user interface field.

This is the paper we presented at CHI'88 that he was referring to (which is why I appreciate his empirical approach to actually measuring usability and performance and error rates):

An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...

Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1

>Steve Jobs Thought Pie Menus Sucked

>On October 25, 1988, I gave Steve Jobs a demo of pie menus, NeWS, UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the Educom conference in Washington DC. His reaction was to jump up and down, point at the screen, and yell “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!”

Don Norman, on the other hand, has never been a big fan of pie menus, and went even further than Jobs just yelling "That sucks!" to explain that was because of all the disasters, pollution, and urban sprawl he thought they could cause, and he even unfairly blamed pie menus for a nuclear meltdown, when a linear menu actually caused it! ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37907449

X11 SimCity Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA

Don Hopkins and Donald Norman at IBM Almaden's "New Paradigms for Using Computers" workshop:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GCPQxJttf0

Norman: "And then when we saw SimCity, we saw how the pop-up menu that they were doing used pie menus, made it very easy to quickly select the various tools we needed to add to the streets and bulldoze out fires, and change the voting laws, etc. Somehow I thought this was a brilliant solution to the wrong problems. Yes it was much easier to now to plug in little segments of city or put wires in or bulldoze out the fires. But why were fires there in the first place? Along the way, we had a nuclear meltdown. He said "Oops! Nuclear meltdown!" and went merrily on his way."

Hopkins: "Linear menus caused the meltdown. But the round menus put the fires out."

Norman: "What caused the meltdown?"

Hopkins: "It was the linear menus."

Norman: "The linear menus?"

Hopkins: "The traditional pull down menus caused the meltdown."

Norman: "Don't you think a major cause of the meltdown was having a nuclear power plant in the middle of the city?"

(laughter)

Hopkins: "The good thing about the pie menus is that they make it really easy to build a city really fast without thinking about it."

(laughter)

Hopkins: "Don't laugh! I've been living in Northern Virginia!"

Norman: "Ok. Isn't the whole point of SimCity how you think? The whole point of SimCity is that you learn the various complexities of controlling a city."

(My joking but also serious point was that in SimCity "Meltdown" is on the linear "Disaster" menu. So linear menus cause meltdowns. But the pie menus has bulldozers and roads, that you can use to recover from meltdowns with.)