When apps have great navigation, it's often unnoticed because people are able to focus on the content and experience. The goal of navigation is to provide enough of a foundation of familiarity so that people can easily discover content and interact with the app.

Navigation involves teaching people about how things behave, where things belong, and how things work in an app.

The two main modes of navigation inside an app are tab bars and interactions.

In this note I’m only writing about tab bars. The note on interactions is linked here.

Tab bars

Tab bars represent the top-level information in the information hierarchy. They are meant to divide your app into sections and groups that are clear and already established.

I’ve noticed that the first tab in a lot of apps have the most features. Here’s why that might usually be the case -

• It’s tempting to have all features be available at a glance.

• As the app evolved over time, the makers missed out on grouping them based on functionality and put the feature in the first tab.

This first tab is usually named the ‘Home’ tab, and starts collecting features over time. While it might sound reasonable to show everything upfront, this poses some issues -

• Accessing any feature now takes time because the user has to scroll every time to reach it.

• Exposing users to everything at once on the app can be overwhelming (depending on the features, of course).

• Moreover, if the features aren’t related, the mindsets in which people use each of them is not the same which could cause a cognitive overload.

To prevent this, the makers should distribute functionality across tabs. If people are unfamiliar with your app, it’s best to organise and communicate content clearly by doing two things -

1. Assess where a feature/content piece belongs in the hierarchy

2. Notice how people engage with it

One justification for creating a ‘Home’ tab is to solve for discoverability. However, discoverability is brought about by content, not function. If an app has just duplicated their features and added them to the Home tab, it creates confusion because there are now multiple ways to access the same things. Due to this, there’s a dissociation between understanding the content and how to act on it.

If your apps' Home tab looks like this, consider removing it.

Here are a few more things to keep in mind when designing an app’s navigation with tab bars -

1. You should never jump tabs by clicking on an element in another tab because it is jarring and disorienting. Moving from one tab to another should never be forced.

2. Avoid removing the tab bar (and keep it persistent) so that people always have access to it. There are some exceptions but for the most part, it should be accessible.

3. The tabs should have clear and concise labels. They have to be representative of what you can do in that tab.

When navigation deviates too far from our expectations or doesn't match our natural understanding of the world, we often feel frustrated and sense that an app is hard to use. But getting navigation right requires focus and intention, and should always be thought of while designing new features for an app.