Navbar in Zite’s iPhone app
Zite, my favorite app on the iPad, has recently released on the iPhone, following in Flipboard’s footsteps. One thing I believed the designers overlooked was the navigation bar (as shown below on left) for the following reasons:
- crams account/sections settings along with the section list, which someone may not discover if they don’t swipe left
- can only view a handful of sections at once
- swiping to a section more than a couple sections away requires the user to stop at an intermediate step before reaching their desired choice
One way to fix these issues would be to implement a menu design that has been popping up in other iOS apps such as Facebook (below) and Path. This would allow Zite to list more categories at once in a vertical fashion, and separate the news categories from the account settings by placing them in their own subsections.
One downside is that it would require two taps (or a swipe left and tap) to switch a category, as opposed to possibly only one swipe in the current UI. However on average, I believe you would reach your desired category faster with a vertical layout, tucked away off the screen and having the UI focused on the article list contents itself.
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