1. Damn the Tab Bar?

    Justin Williams’ piece Die You Damn, Dirty Tab Bar has had me thinking for the past week - and I’ll admit that I’ve been meaning to post something meaningful about it ever since - particularly this quote:

    Rather than taking the easy way and slapping a tab bar at the bottom of your UI, put the extra effort into the design process to see if it is possible to do the application using a single navigation stack.

    Whilst the Tab Bar isn’t designed to be used in every situation, I’d say it’s far from a cop-out if what you’re looking for is quick navigation around the app. Take, for example, an app I’m working on at the moment - please excuse the vagueness :). There’s uses where, if the user doesn’t see something of their liking in one tab, they might want to search for something instead. In your usual drill-down application, you’ll have switched to view A, and need to somehow get to the search view (B). That requires 1 tap to return to your homescreen and another tap to head to the Search view. With the Tab bar, there’s just one: to the view in question. When speed is the order of the day, I can’t help but find the Tab Bar to be my navigation of choice - particularly when walking along and using the iPhone with just one hand (and predominantly using my thumb).

    Of course, that’s not to say that speed in a drill-down isn’t possible. There’s one prime example of this: Buzz Andersen’s very excellent Twitter client Birdfeed (which Justin also uses as an example). The number one thing in Birdfeed that makes it a joy to use is the simple ‘Return to Homescreen’ button that makes it easy to get to the top of the navigation stack. It’s also something that the likes of Tweetie (and most other Tab Bar based applications) could learn from, ironically.

    Be sure to see Justin’s followup where he takes a Tab Bar application, and suggests how it might be reworked.

    Posted on Tuesday July 14th, 2009

    Notes

    1. nikf posted this