I have previously argued that the hamburger menu is a clumsy navigation device and had poor discoverability. Yes, it is popular on web sites today, but it is really old-fashioned. It takes the File, Edit, View, Help menus from the early 90s and combines them into one. Doesn’t live up to the elegance of Roon’s Information Architecture, with the central link navigation in the metadata.
With every new release, the problem gets worse. 1.3 offers new cool stuff, hidden behind the hamburger menu.
I had suggested icons along the top, but @Danny convinced me that this wouldn’t work, there are too many of them. (I tried, he is right.) And it isn’t just the hamburger items I would like immediate access to, bookmarks as well.
Rock and a hard place,
But I noticed that several modern cars have a good generalization of the old radio station shortcut buttons: you can store anything in a shortcut button, a radio station or a phone number or a navigation address or a setting (massage chair!).
Seems we could emulate that: let me store a view, of any kind, in a row of buttons along the top edge, between the hamburger/back/forth group and the bookmark/filter/search group. And let me provide a text or an icon to label it.
Right now I have a car that allows these shortcuts to become a scrollable list; this adds flexibility but it is gilding the lily. My previous car had a fixed set, limited but arguably more practical.
Generalizing the views completely may be over-complicated and unnecessary: do I really need a direct-access button for PEQ for each zone? We can simplify the whole concept by allowing only bookmarks (and then control what can be handled by defining bookmarking capability). A totally simple design would be to fit in as many bookmark labels as will fit on each device – we already have reordering for prioritazion. With this approach, it becomes very simple.
Adding icon support adds a bit complexity. But again, my previous car had unlabeled buttons – there were only 8 of them, how hard is it to remember?