Three “hamburgers” but still no direct link to meta

Question

Users from EL&U will know I am not an admirer of the new theme which has befallen on my once beloved site. See my answer on English Language & Usage's updated site theme is ready for testing! which seems to have drawn some consensus among regular users.

One of the questions I asked never received a formal explanation

I do not understand why there are now three ‘hamburgers’, and why the hamburger on the left does not brighten when it is clicked. In my modest opinion, due to its gloomy appearance, it is easily missed and its utility overlooked.

and

So, I'm asking here. I would like to know why the designers have created three hamburger icons on the top bar.

Technically, I know that the new menu icon, (☰) which is situated far left, is not the same as the SE hamburger logo but the two look remarkably similar. For the scope of this post and the sake of clarity, I'll call it the sandwich.

1. The sandwich icon permits users to navigate to “home”, “questions”, “tags”, “users”, and “unanswered".
2. The Stack exchange logo allows visitors to view all the hottest questions from all the different communities on a single page.
3. The hamburger allows quick and easy access to sites which users belong to, followed by a long list of communities of which they do not, i.e. “more stack exchange communities” and a link to the SE's company blog.

Now, I'm not a designer but it seems to me that the sandwich menu should be brighter. Currently it is practically invisible, a dark grey icon on a pitch black background, it doesn't light up and it's situated on the far right-hand side. But not all is lost, there is a positive note, the sandwich menu has enough space to include the options displayed in the hamburger menu. In other words, the sandwich could have another button with a drop down menu allowing quick and easy access to those communities which interest users the most. Let's call that button “your communities”. This would eliminate the need of the hamburger icon and free up space on the top bar where I would urgently recommend that the developers insert a direct link to meta by means of the word “meta”. No weird icon, no indecipherable image, just ‘meta’ written in white, so it can stand out more.

The link can fit beside the Stack exchange logo (I apologise! Yes, it should be in the same font as the Stack Exchange logo and the kerning leaves a lot to be desired but this is the best I could come up with using the very limited tools available to me.) BTW, the search bar would have to shift a little closer toward the centre.

related:

1. How do users navigate to Meta?

2. Add easier links to meta sites

3. Two years later: How has moving the Meta link affected Meta usage? (posted 2015)

4. Understanding the significance of the elimination of one-click transfer between main and meta

5. Asking a question pertaining to another SE site that doesn't have meta

Answer 1

Consider the layout of the top bar. On the left are items that pertain to that particular site. The menu on the left contains items that are relevant to just that site: the Home page, Question page, etc.

On the right are items that pertain to you the user. Your user page (for that site). Your notifications. Your rep changes. And at the far right is a list of SE sites. And your favorite sites are listed first, in an order you define.

The point being that the current organization reads right-to-left, more site-specific to user specific.

Now, there are several UI elements that work against this: the Stack Exchange logo isn't site-specific at all. And the review/help buttons are site-specific. But my point is that, given the current UI design, site-specific things tend to go on the left, and user-specific things go on the right.

So putting the list of your favorite SE sites on the left is somewhat incongruous to this UI design.

Adding to this is the fact that the "sandwich" menu doesn't have to exist. By default (unless you change your settings), this is the left navigation panel and there is no button. So, do users want the left navigation panel to always have these sites listed? I suspect not. Indeed, when SE talks about adding more stuff to this panel, the stuff they tend to talk about is site-specific (saved searches and so forth).

So, what you're asking for is not really a good thing for the way that SE wants the site to work.