No place like app home

Creating a usable and intuitive mobile app requires a good structure and navigation. The norm, as with other areas of app design, has been to adopt web design best practice. However, the resulting experience is often less than optimal because the design decisions when creating a website are based on different usage and on years of pre-created user expectation.

One area I think this is particularly evident is the use of “Home” as a navigational element. When designing for iPhone or Android for instance, with their prominent ‘icon bar’ along the bottom of the screen imitating the use of a website ‘top navigation’, I repeatedly find myself defaulting to “Home” as the first icon, yet feeling this to be somehow inefficient. I have yet to fully resolve what the solution to this is, but here are some things which I think help inform the design:

  • “Home” is a crucial navigational aid on most websites. I’ve witnessed many users in website usability tests who have always navigated back to a website homepage to start a task, as if “all routes start here” is imprinted across the back of their eyeballs. However, this is not necessarily the case with mobile apps, which are often more explicitly focused on a single tasks or group of related tasks. In fact, whilst I’ve not conducted website usability for some time, I’d hazard a guess that this behaviour is less blatant in current web usage as many more sites become “web apps” and adopt navigational methods and language specific to their content and features [Facebook, Twitter and GMail don't even have a "Home" in their navigation for instance].
  • For apps which replicate a website approach – for instance about a company or organisation – there is presumably some rationale to having a “home page” in the app. That said, if you find yourself working on an app which replicates a website, the bigger question should probably be why a mobile web delivery solution wasn’t implemented instead, which would be accessible by any modern smartphone!
  • Many digital experiences improve by adapting to the user. Websites have done this by the home page becoming increasingly personalised based on the user’s explicit or implicit usage. Mobile apps can be similarly optimised by adapting over time to the user, perhaps moving from an “introductory mode” to expose advanced features as the user becomes more adept, or hiding features over time that aren’t used. However, it feels lazy to do this by a single “page” becoming personalised. Why not just be brave and adapt the whole app experience to grow with the user.
  • One of the issues apparent in the above thoughts is the use of “page” within mobile app interfaces. Pages make sense on the web and do so in some mobile apps, but generally as mobile interface designers we design “screens” and as mobile developers we build “views” [and sub-views]. Embracing this this different structure and presentational method is crucial in why “Home” doesn’t make sense in apps.

I’ve not reached a conclusion regarding an alternative to Home in mobile apps, nor even a fixed rule as to when it is appropriate and when it isn’t. However, I think the underlying principle is to be bolder with mobile app experiences, and not be afraid to break from web practices to create innovative approaches to mobile app navigational methods.

3rd January 2012

Ben Childs

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