The Hamburger Icon in Mobile Casinos

Mobile casino navigation is a priority for development teams that work tirelessly towards providing a better player experience, one that allows the slots or games player to tap and swipe around the games and the information available with ease. That small mobile screen however, whether you be using a tablet or a smartphone, can be problematic for mobile casino designers, as quite simply, there's only so much you can squeeze onto a page without it becoming impossibly difficult to either read, or tap away from.

Designers do of course have a few tools in their kits to assist with problematic navigation and one of those is the three bar hamburger icon that you'll see in many mobile casinos, especially if you're using a smaller screened smartphone, however from a casino design perspective, the jury is still very much out on them.

You will have seen that small hamburger icon on many of the most popular mobile sites and apps, and you may be used to giving it a tap to get to other areas of the site, however the general consensus among many of the world's best mobile site and app designers is that what's out of sight is out of mind, and this is true of mobile casino design too. Many of the best mobile casinos, from a design perspective at least, are trying to move away from using the hamburger icon, and are providing as many direct links from the mobile homepage as possible. This isn't to say that you'll see links to absolutely everything from the homepage, but at least to all of the important features such as the login, registration, games and promotions pages.

Perhaps the two best examples of the way designers are now moving are to be seen on the new designs of Gossip Slots mobile and that of the revamped new look Slots.LV mobile casino, who both, while still using the hamburger icon, only do so as an almost last resort. Using an Android tablet and taking a look at Slots.LV, we can see that in landscape view the hamburger is nowhere to be seen and you can tap to anywhere on the site, and it's only if you hold the tablet in portrait view that the hamburger icon becomes visible. It's a similar case in Gossip Slots, where in landscape you will see the hamburger icon but it only leads to pages such as T's and C's, forgotten password links and privacy policy pages, pages that players wouldn't necessarily be searching for.

Older mobile casinos will still feature the hamburger icon a whole lot more than is good for design, however it is being phased out as casinos realize that it's tap and play, or at least tap and get the info that you're looking for that players really want, and that's what the best US mobile casinos are now delivering.