If you have a tab-bar, use the tab-bar.
My biggest feedback from the iOS 8 early access is that how the app has a tab-bar at the bottom, but 85% of the app is jammed into the first tab view.
As a designer I’ve been confronted with situations where we want an app to NOT have a tab-bar and sometimes it works out well, often not as well. But in the end, if you’re going to use a tab bar, you’ve got up to 5 spots. You don’t need to use them all—but this isn’t a great compromise.
- One tab for settings (which after you’ve got it set up, you hardly ever use)
- One for search (which you use all the time, but is often empty or is showing the last search)
- And the first one is for everything else.
And that “Everything” is All Items, Favorites, Watchtower, Recently Created and Modified, All Categories, All Tags, Vaults, Archive, and Deleted. Holy cow. So there’s so much scrolling and tapping and expanding/collapsing to get to things you are trying to find.
I can imagine a lot of different ways to “chunk” all this content into 3 to 5 container views which a tab-bar would work for. Personally do something like this:
- Vaults up with the collection switcher (they are the containers after all)
- Favorites and recently created/modified on one tab view
- All items, categories, tags, archive, deleted on their own tab
- Watchtower on it’s own tab maybe. I think its important and you can badge it to get attention when something is bad.
- Search should be it’s own tab for sure, Apple/iOS convention is that it’s often the last tab though. And it should never be empty, it can show tags or other natural search suggestions, recent searches, etc. Honestly you could put categories here if you wanted instead of with All Items etc.
- Settings could stay a tab, but honestly it could be in the vault selection menu too or similarly a bit more hidden.
Anyway, one users (and designers) take on the new update. There’s a lot to love, I am enjoying the beta immensely, don’t take my above structural comments personally or to mean that I’m not happy with the attention and openness to change that 1Password has been exploring. Overall I think a lot of great things are happening in here for sure.
1Password Version: 8/7.0 (80700090 BETA)
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: Not Provided
Comments
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Wow @instanttim this is such great feedback! Thank you so much for taking the time to write this up this is all great and very valuable input. I'll put it in our feature/suggestion tracker. Again thank you for your time getting this to us!
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