Once someone starts using your app, they need to know where to go and how to get there at any point. Good navigation is a vehicle that takes users where they want to go. But establishing good navigation is a challenge on mobile due to the limitations of the small screen and the need to prioritize content over decorative elements.
Creating good navigation is an essential part of mobile app design. Various navigation patterns have been devised to solve this challenge in different ways, but they all suffer from a variety of usability problems. In this article, we’ll examine a few basic mobile navigation patterns and describe the strengths and weaknesses of each of them.
Hamburger menu
Screen space is a precious commodity on
mobile, and the hamburger menu (or side drawer) is one of the most popular mobile navigation design
patterns for helping you save it. The hamburger menu allows you to hide
the navigation beyond the edge of the screen and reveal it only upon a user’s
action.
In its default state, the hamburger menu and all of its contents remain hidden.When to use
The main downside of the hamburger menu is its low discoverability, and it’s not recommended as the primary navigation menu. However, this pattern might be an appropriate solution for secondary navigation options. Secondary navigation options are destinations or features that are important for users only in certain circumstances. Being secondary, they can be relegated to less prominent visual placement, as long as users can quickly find a utility when they need it. By hiding these options behind the hamburger icon, designers avoid overwhelming users with too many options.
Uber uses a hamburger icon for this
purpose. Because everything about the main screen of the Uber app is focused on
requesting a car, there’s no need to display secondary options such as
“Payment,” “History” or “Settings.” The normal user flow doesn’t include these
actions, and so they can be hidden behind the hamburger icon.
Properly used hamburger menu. Image credit Uber.Pros
- A large number of navigation options. The main advantage of the navigation menu is that it can accommodate a fairly large number of navigation options in a tiny space.
- Clean design. The hamburger menu allows the designer to free up screen real estate by shifting options off-screen into a side menu. This pattern can be particularly useful if you want the user to focus on the main content.
Cons
- Less discoverable. What’s out of sight is out of mind. When navigation is hidden, users are less likely to use it. While this type of navigation is becoming standard and many mobile users are familiar with it, many people still simply don’t think to open it.
- Clashes with platform navigation rules. The hamburger menu has become almost a standard on Android (the pattern has the name “navigation drawer” in material design), but in iOS, it simply cannot be implemented without clashing with basic navigation elements, and this could overload the navigation bar.
Hamburger menu overload the iOS navbar. Image credit lmjabreu.- The hamburger icon hides context. The hamburger menu doesn’t communicate the current location at a glance: surfacing information about the current location is harder because it’s only visible when the person clicks on the hamburger icon.
Out of sight, out of mind. The hamburger menu hides the user’s current location in the app. Image credit lmjabreu.- Extra action is required to move to the target destination. Reaching a particular page usually takes at least two taps (one tap on the menu icon and another on the target option).
Tips
- Prioritize the navigation options. If the navigation is complex, hiding it won’t make it user-friendly. A lot of practical examples clearly show that exposing menu options more visibly increases engagement and user satisfaction. Ask yourself, “What’s important enough to be visible on mobile?” Answering that question will require an understanding of what matters to your users.
- Consider using tabs. A tab bar works well if you have a limited number of high-priority navigation options.
YouTube makes the main pieces of core functionality available with one tap, allowing rapid switching between features. Image credit Luke Wroblewski.- Review your information architecture. Good apps are highly focused. So, if you have one complex app, you could split its functionality into two (or more) simple apps. Facebook released its Messenger app to solve the problem of complexity. The reduced functionality results in a reduced set of menu options, and less need for a hamburger menu.
Facebook decided to spit the apps to simplify navigation. Image credit Techcrunch.Tab bar
The tab bar is a mobile navigation design pattern that was
inherited from desktop design. It usually contains relatively few destinations,
and those destinations are of similar importance and require direct access from
anywhere in the app.
The tab bar doesn’t hide navigation, it allows direct access and presents feedback on the icon it’s related to.When to use
Tabbed navigation is a great solution for
apps with relatively few top-level navigation options (up to five). The tab bar
makes the main pieces of core functionality available with one tap, allowing
rapid switching between features.
The tab bar on Twitter lets the user navigate directly to the screen associated with the item.Pros
- The tab bar fairly easily communicates the current location. Properly used visual cues (icons, labels, and colors) enable the user to understand their current location at a glance.
Tab bar is one of the most glanceable navigation design patterns. Image credit Ramotion.- Tab bars are persistent. The navigation remains in sight no matter what page the user is viewing. The user has clear visibility of all the main app views and has single-click access to them.
- Within thumb zone. The bottom navigation is easier to reach with the thumb when the device is held in one hand.
Ideal placement of navigation for the thumb zone, according to UXmag. Image credit UXmag.Cons
- The navigation options are limited. If your app has more than five options, then fitting them in a tab or navigation bar and still keeping an optimum touch-target size would be hard.
Don’t use more than five options in a tab bar.- The location and logic of the tab bar options on iOS and Android are different. Platforms have different rules and guidelines for UI and usability, and you have to consider them when designing a tab bar for a particular platform. Tabs appear at the top of the screen on Android and the bottom of the screen on iOS. This happens presumably because Android’s control bar at the bottom is hardware. Please note that this rule doesn’t apply to mobile websites, because the experience with them should be consistent regardless of the device used to browse them (Android or iOS).
Proper location and logic will help to maintain a consistent experience with other apps on the platform and prevent confusion between actions and view-switching. Image credit Google.Tips
- Make touch targets big enough to be easily tapped or clicked. To calculate the width of each bottom navigation action, divide the width of the view by the number of actions. Alternatively, make all bottom navigation actions the width of the largest action.
Most users can comfortably and reliably hit a 10 × 10-millimeter touch target. Image credit UXmag.- Order the navigation options. Users expect to see a certain order in the tab bar. The first tab item has to be the home screen of the app, and the order of tabs should reflect their priority or the logical order in the user flow. One of the tabs should always be active and visually highlighted.
- Test your icons for usability. As you can see in the example below, app designers sometimes hide functionality behind icons that are pretty hard to recognize. To prevent this from happening, test your icons with the five-second rule: If it takes you more than five seconds to think of an appropriate icon for something, then it is unlikely that an icon can effectively communicate that meaning.
Clarity is an essential property of navigation design patterns. Bloom.fm app has a tab bar full of abstract icons.- If an icon fails the five-second rule (i.e. isn’t self-evident), it needs a text label. It’s pretty rare in the offline world that we rely on iconography alone to represent ideas — and for good reason. Due to the absence of a standard usage for most icons, text labels are necessary to communicate meaning and reduce ambiguity. Users should understand what exactly will happen before they tap on an element.
Use text labels to provide short, meaningful definitions to bottom navigation icons. Image credit Material Design.Priority+ pattern
The “Priority+” mobile navigation design pattern was coined by Michael Scharnagl to describe navigation that works well for responsive design. It exposes what’s deemed to be the most important navigation elements and hides away less important items behind a “more” button.
When to use
This pattern might be a good solution for content-heavy apps and websites with a lot of different sections and pages (such as a news website or a large retailer’s store). The Guardian makes use of the priority+ pattern for its section navigation. Less important items are revealed when the user hits the “All” button.
The Guardian employs the Priority+ pattern for its section navigation. Image credit BradFrost.Pros
- This pattern prioritizes navigation options. It surfaces the most frequently accessed navigation options.
- It makes use of available screen space. As space increases, the number of exposed navigation options increases as well, which can result in better visibility and more engagement.
- This menu is very adaptive. You can scale it quite nicely across screen sizes without having to transform the pattern.
Cons
- It might hide some important navigation options. The priority+ pattern requires designers to assume the relative importance of navigation items. Be aware that the items you prioritize to be visible might not be the same ones users are looking for most.
Floating action button
Shaped like a circle icon floating above the UI, the floating action button changes color upon focus and lifts upon selection. It’s well known by all Android users and is a distinct element of material design. Floating above the interface of an app, it promotes user action, says Google.
Floating action button. Image credit Google.When to use
The design of the floating action button hinges
on the premise that users will perform a certain action most of the time. You
can make this “hero” action even more heroic by reinforcing the sense that it
is a core use case of your app. For example, a music app might have a floating
action button that represents “play.”
Use the floating action button for actions that are strongly characteristic of your app. Playback tells users that this is a music app.The button is a natural cue to users for what to do next. In user research, Google found that users understand it as a wayfinding tool. When faced with an unfamiliar screen, as many users are regularly (like when running an app for the first time), they will use the floating action buttons to navigate. Thus, it is a way to prioritize the most important action you want users to take.
Pros
- It’s a signpost of what’s important. It’s a good way to prioritize the most important action you want users to take.
- It takes up little screen space. Compared to the tab bar, it doesn’t take up an entire row.
- A visually pleasing UI element such as this might not improve usability. However, emotion is a factor in user experience. If a user is pleased to use an app because they find it visually attractive, then that would create positive UX effects.
- It also improves effectiveness. A study by Steve Jones demonstrates that a floating action button slightly impairs usability when users first interact with the button. However, once users have successfully completed a task using the element, they are able to use it more efficiently than a traditional action button.
Cons
- A floating action button can distract users from the content. It is designed to stand out — it is colorful, raised and grid-breaking. Its design is meant to draw the user’s attention. But sometimes its presence can distract the user from the main content.
A red button stands out from the background and focuses user attention. Image credit Paul van Oijen.- It can block content. Take Google’s Gmail app for instance. In the example below, you can see that it blocks the “favorite” star, as well as the time stamp for the last row. Additional scrolling is needed whenever the user wants to see this information.
Floating action button in Android app. Image credit Material Design.- It is also icon-only navigation. By design, the floating action button is a circle containing an icon. It’s an icon-only button, with no room for text labels. The problem is that icons are incredibly hard to understand because they’re so open to interpretation. Even a simple action icon like the pencil in the example below can mean different things in different apps.
Same icon, different meanings: “Compose” in the Gmail and Inbox apps, but “Edit” in the Snapseed app. Here, context helps to explain the action.Tips
- Less is more. Because it is so prominent and intrusive, use only one per screen.
Multiple floating action buttons should never appear on screen at one time because that would confuse the visual hierarchy.- Prioritize usage. Not every screen should have one, simply because not every screen has an action of such importance.
- The floating action button is strongly associated with positive actions. Because it is full of character, it’s generally taken to be a positive action, like create, favorite, navigate, search and so on. Don’t use it for destructive actions, like delete.
Dos and don’ts for floating action button design.- The floating action button could be replaced with a sequence of more specific actions. This would help to surface a set that doesn’t really belong at the top but is still important. Apps such as Evernote simplify the controls by using a floating action button for the most important user actions.
Floating action button in Evernote. Image credit Evernote.- It can improve transitions between screens, too. The floating action button is not just a round button; it has some transformative properties that you can use to ease users from screen to screen. It can expand, morph and react.
Full-screen navigation
While with other mobile navigation patterns mentioned in
this article, you’d be struggling to minimize the space that the navigation
systems take up, the full-screen pattern takes the exact opposite approach.
This navigation approach usually devotes the home page exclusively to
navigation. Users incrementally tap or swipe to reveal additional menu options
as they scroll up and down.
When to use
This pattern works well in task-based and
direction-based websites and apps, especially when users tend to limit
themselves to only one branch of the navigation hierarchy during a single
session. Funneling users from broad overview pages to detail pages helps them
to home in on what they’re looking for and to focus on content within an
individual section.
Full-screen navigation options in Yelp.Pros
- The full-screen navigation pattern is best for achieving simplicity and coherence. You can organize large chunks of information in a coherent manner and reveal information without overwhelming the user; once the user makes their decision about where to go, then you can dedicate the entire screen space to content.
Cons
- Prime real estate will be used for the purpose of navigation. You won’t be able to display any content except the navigation options.
Tips
- Use a hamburger menu to hide
secondary functionality and keep the focus on the main experience.
Using two navigation design patterns together. Image credit Dribbble.Gesture-based navigation
June 29th, 2007 was a game-changer. From
the moment Apple launched the first fully touchscreen smartphone on the market,
mobile devices have been dominated by touchscreen interaction.
All possible types of gestures in mobile apps. Image credit Aaron Wade.Gestures immediately became popular among
designers, and many apps were designed around experimenting with gesture
controls.
Creative navigation design patterns: gesture driven to-do app Clear.In today’s world, the success of a mobile
app can largely depend on how well gestures are implemented in the user
experience.
When to use
This mobile navigation pattern is good when users want
to explore the details of particular content easily and intuitively. Users will
spend more time with content than they will with navigation menus. So, one of
the reasons to use in-context gestures instead of a standard menu is that it’s
more engaging. For example, as users view page content, they can tap on a card
to learn more.
This type of navigation takes users on a journey of what they’re interested in. Image credit Ramotion.Pros
- It removes UI clutter. Building gestures into the heart of your design allows you to make your interfaces more minimal and to save screen space for valuable content.
- The UI is more natural. Luke Wroblewski talks about a study in which 40 people in 9 different countries were asked to create gestures for 28 different tasks, such as deleting, scrolling and zooming. He found that gestures tend to be similar across culture and experience. For example, when prompted to “delete,” most people — regardless of nationality — tried dragging the object off-screen.
- Gestures can be a distinctive feature of a product. Tinder has massively popularized the concept of gesture-based navigation and basically made those swipes a product-defining gesture.
Gestures in Tinder. Image credit Tinder.Cons
- The navigation is invisible. One important rule in designing a UI is visibility: through the menus, all possible actions should be made visible and, therefore, easily discoverable. An invisible UI can be seductively beautiful, but because it’s invisible, it will likely have many usability issues.
- User effort increases. Most gestures are neither natural nor easy to learn or remember. When designing gesture-based navigation, be aware that every time you remove UI clutter, the application’s learning curve goes up; and without proper visual hints and cues, users could get confused about how to interact with the app.
Tips
- Make sure you don’t have to teach people a whole new way to interact with an interface. Design a familiar experience. In order to design good gesture-based navigation, start by looking at the current state of gestures in the mobile world. For example, if you’re designing an email app, you could use a swipe instead of an email gesture, because there’s a strong possibility that the gesture would be familiar to many users:
Mobile navigation design patterns should be easy to learn.- Educate in context to teach people how to interact with your interface. Avoid long static up-front tutorials. Instead, show only the information that is relevant to the user’s current activity.
Pudding Monsters uses an animated hand to present a new scenario to users. Image credit Pudding Monsters.Innovative mobile navigation design patterns
People are shifting to larger-screen phones. But the bigger the display is, the less easily accessible most of the screen is, and the more necessary it is to adapt the design (and navigation, in particular) to improve the user experience.
Innovative navigation patterns. Image credit Luke Wroblewski.To solve this problem, designers are forced to look for new solutions to mobile navigation. A couple of interesting innovative solutions can be found in the recently published article “Bottom Navigation Interface.” One solution can be found in a health app named Ada. This app’s interface layout is a mirror image of a basic interface with a hamburger menu: everything that’s usually at the top is conveniently at the bottom, in the easy-to-access zone.
The start screen in Ada for iOS.The second solution is a concept for a
calling app that applies one-handed navigation principles. The method feels
good for calling and messaging apps because users tend to use one hand for
dialing and texting.
Innovative navigation design patterns. GIF credit Cuberto.Conclusion
Helping users navigate should be a high
priority for every app designer. Both new and returning users should be able to
figure out how to move through your app with ease. The easier your product is
for them to use, the more likely they’ll use it.