Who invented the mobile side menu concept? [UI]

There are many articles addressing the question: “who invented the burger menu icon” (that 3 stripes icon we all use to open a side menu in our mobile apps). But not many people know the origins of the side menu concept.

Being an old man, I recently came across a very old blog post I wrote years ago (back in 2008 when my smartphone ran Windows Mobile…) that talks about Mozilla Fennec – Mozilla’s first attempt to create a mobile web browser.

It was designed to run on Windows Mobile and as you can see from the design documents below – it included 2 innovative gestures to bring in and out additional side panels from the left and right sides. Wow.

The design document included the following:

Problem: Add functionality to the reader mode while still maintaining a chromeless, reading focused layout.
Solution: Introduce off screen menus rendered visible with swiping gestures.

And this was in 2008, short after the first iPhone was introduced and just to remind you – the iPhone did have side menus included in the design guidelines.

To my knowledge, this was the first time in the history of mobile software that a side menu was pushed-in and out of the screen to expose additional capabilities beyond the screen real-estate. It was the first side menu ever.

Then came the burger icon and the rest is history; the side menu became a mobile standard and a perfect way for popular apps to create a unified experience across operating systems and device types (even beyond mobile).

User interface guides and best practices:

• 40 UI rules for designing and writing better text in mobile apps
• 84 cognitive biases you should use to design better products (part I)
• 84 cognitive biases to help you design better-converting products (part II)
• 20 Dark Patterns to avoid when designing products
• 20 UI rules for designing data tables that don't suck
• 10 lessons learned from asking our users to pay
• Is 'the fold' still a thing in today’s scrolling and skimming culture?
• Lessons learned from our App Store screenshots redesign

Of course, after few years in which all the leading apps used a side menu – there is now a new trend to switch back to traditional tabs replacing the side menu: the best example is facebook that adopted the side menu few years ago and now switched back to iOS style tabs. Apple never included the side menu as a “best practice” for its’ iOS UX guidelines so who knows, maybe we are witnessing the end of the side menu era.