Basic Patterns for Mobile Navigation - dellingerknobson

Navigation done your app should be intuitive and predictable. Both new and returning users should be able to solve how to move done your app with ease. But making navigation discoverable and accessible is a challenge on transportable due to the limitations of the small screen and to the need of prioritizing the happy over the UI elements. Different pilotage patterns attempt to solve this challenge in different ways, but they all ache from a variety of usability problems.

In this article, we'll examine three basic navigation patterns for versatile apps — hamburger menu, tab bar, and gesture-based navigation — and describe the strengths and weaknesses of all of them.

Hamburger Menu

Block out space is a precious commodity on racy and the beefburger menu (or lateral draftsman) is one of the most touristed mobile piloting patterns that help you save it. The drawer panel allows you to hide the piloting on the far side the left edge of the screen and disclose it only aft a substance abuser's actions. This pattern can be in particular useful if you want your drug user to focalize on the main content.

In its default state, the hamburger menu and all of its table of contents remain unseeable

Example

As you can see, an actual menu is hidden behind the hamburger icon.

Previous version of Foursquare. Image credit: lmjabreu

Pros

• Blown-up number of navigation options. The main vantage of the navigation menu is that it can contain a fairly large number of navigation options in a lilliputian space.
• Clean design. Free upbound screen real estate by shifting the options off the screen into a side menu.

Cons

• • Hidden pilotage is less determinable. What's concealed, is exterior of mind. When navigation is hidden, users are less likely to use navigation. While this type of navigation becomes stock and more mobile users are familiar information technology, many citizenry still simply don't consider to open it.
  • Clash with political program navigation rules. The hamburger menu has become almost a stock happening Android (the pattern has a name Navigation drawer in Material Design), but in iOS IT plainly cannot be implemented without clashing with the basic navigation elements, and this can overload the pilotage bar.

Attempt to use a burger bill of fare in iOS app. Image credit: lmjabreu

• The hamburger icon hides context. Hamburger menu doesn't pass along the current location in a glance, it's harder to grade-constructed the entropy nearly the current location as it's only visible when and the person clicks on a burger picture.
• Extra fulfill required to move to the target destination. Reaching a especial page usually takes at least two clicks (same click connected the menu ikon and the other — to the target page).

Tips

• • Prioritize navigation options. If your seafaring is intricate, hiding IT does non make it mobile-friendly. A lot of practical examples clearly bear witness that exposing menu options in a more visible direction increases engagement and user satisfaction. Ask round yourself: "What's important enough to be telescopic on mobile?" Answering that question requires an understanding of what matters to your users.

Image credit: lukew

• • Consider using tabs or tab bar if you have a limited number of extremely prioritized navigation options.

YouTube makes intense pieces of core functionality available with one water tap, allows fast switching between features. Credits: Luke Wroblewski

• Review your information architecture. Good apps are highly focused. So if you have one labyrinthian app you commode split its functions betwixt two (or more) orbiculate apps. Facebook released its Messenger app in order to clear this problem of complexity. The reduced functionality results in a reduced place of menu options, and less need for a hamburger menu.

Tab Bar

Tab ginmill pattern is inherited from desktop contrive. It usually contains a relatively few destinations of similar importance and these destinations require direct access from anywhere in the app.

The tab bar doesn't shroud navigation, earmark direct access and present feedback along the icon it's correlated.

Example

Tab bar on Twitter lets the substance abuser navigate directly to the screen associated with the item.

Twitter app for iOS. Fancy credit: Mashable

Pros

• Tab blockade fairly easily communicates the present-day location. Properly put-upon visual cues (icons, labels, and colours) make self-evident so doesn't require any explanation.
• Tab bars are haunting. They persist all the navigation options on screen at all times so your users have solve visibility of all the main app views and sole-chatter access to them.

Cons

• • A limited number of seafaring options. If your app has to a higher degree 5 options, information technology's hard to fit them in a yellow journalism or navigation bar and still keep an optimal touch-target size.

Don't use more than 5 options in a tab bar

• Different location and system of logic behind the tab bar options for iOS and Android. Platforms have disparate rules and guidelines regarding UI and serviceability and you undergo to take this into consideration when designing a tab bar for a particular platform. IT throne appear at the top (Android mostly) or at the bottom of the page (iOS mostly). Also on iOS, it's common to use a bottom tab bar to electric switch between views in the app. Android's platform convention is to presentation tabs for view ascendance at the top of the blind instead. In addition, Android apps may use derriere bars to display actions.

Prudish location and logical system wish help asseverate a consistent experience with other apps along the platform and forbid confusion between actions and view-switching. Image accredit: Google

Tips

• Cook come to targets big enough. Make targets big sufficiency to be easily tapped or clicked. To calculate the width of each hind end navigation action, watershed the width of the watch aside the number of actions. Alternatively, micturate all bottom navigation actions the width of the largest military action.

Nearly users can comfortably and reliably hit a 10mm by 10mm touch target. Picture credit: uxmag

Use text labels in order to provide sawn-off, meaningfully definitions to rump navigation icons

Gesture-Based Navigation

June 29, 2007, was a crippled-changer. From the moment Apple launched the first fully touchscreen smartphone happening the commercialize, mobile devices have been controlled by touchscreen interaction.

Gestures immediately became popular among designers and there were many apps that were designed approximately experimenting with gesture controls.

Gesture driven to-do app Clear

In today's world, the success of a mobile app lav dramatically bet on how well gestures are implemented into its exploiter experience.

Exercise

Tinder changed their industriousness with the swipe gestures, sol it's become almost product-defining gesture. Mass associate the app with the "swipe left" operating theatre "sideswipe right."

Pros

• Removing UI clutter. Building gestures into the affectionateness of your design allows you to make much minimal interfaces and to save up screen space for of import content.
• "Natural Drug user Interface". Luke Wroblewski, in his clause, provides information about the study in which 40 people in nine different countries were asked to create gestures for 28 variant tasks like deleting, scrolling, zooming, etc. The important thing to note is that the gestures cared-for be similar crossways polish and experience. For example, when prompted to "delete", most people — regardless of nationality — well-tried slow the targe turned-screen.

Cons

• Invisible navigation. The immodest design rule of a UI is visibility: through the menus, all realizable actions can embody successful visible and, therefore, easily determinable. An invisible drug user interface rump be seductively beautiful but because it is lightless it is likely to have many a usability issues: since gestures are always hidden, users demand to find them firstborn and just like in case of the hamburger bill of fare: if you hide an option, fewer people will usance it.
• Increased user effort. Nearly gestures are neither natural nor sluttish to larn or remember. When designing motion-based navigation, glucinium remindful that every meter you remove UI clutter, the application program's learning curve goes up and without straight-laced visual hints and cues, users could get along confused about how to interact with the app.

Tips

• • Bring i sure you're non having to teach people a whole new way of interacting with an interface. Design the everyday experience. Ready to design a good gesture-based seafaring, you have to start by looking at the afoot state of gestures in the mobile world. For example, if you design an email app you can use a swiping over an email gesture because thither's a strong theory that it'll constitute known gestures for many users:

• Utilise progressive disclosure with slight visual cues to learn the great unwashe how to interact with your interface. Keep in judgement, that you take to show only the information that is relevant to the exploiter's current activity, almost the same means atomic number 3 games revealing game mechanics as you go off further into a gamy

Conclusion

Portion users navigate should be a intoxicated antecedence for all app. Always think about your user persona, think about the goals they have when using your app, and usage your navigation to help them fill those goals. The easier your production is for them to use, the more likely they'll be to use IT.

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About the Author: Nick Babich is a software developer and author of a blog dedicated to usability

Source: https://blog.icons8.com/articles/basic-patterns-for-mobile-navigation/

Posted by: dellingerknobson.blogspot.com

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