While the previous design is less aesthetically appealing, it’s more or less straightforward.
#Ux ui inbox app android#
In Android Lollipop, the navigation bar was redesigned to this: Navigation bar, Android Lollipop and up One of the UI elements that got redesigned was the navigation bar, the persistent bar at the bottom of Android OS that provides navigation control for phones without hardware buttons for Back, Home and Menu. Navigation bar in earlier versions of Android Material Design’s first major mystery meat navigation problem happened in 2014 with Android Lollipop.Īndroid Lollipop was introduced in the same conference that debuted Material Design, and sports a redesigned UI to match Google’s new design language. Strike 1: Android Lollipop’s Navigation Bar You wouldn’t want to eat mystery meat-similarly, users wouldn’t want to click on mystery buttons. And if your users need to guess, you’re doing it wrong. It adds cognitive load to navigational tasks, since users have to guess what the button does. It’s bad UX design, because it emphasizes aesthetics at the cost of user experience. Mystery meat navigation is the hallmark of designs that prioritize form over function. (The term “mystery meat” originates from the meat served in American public school cafeterias that were so processed that the type of animal they came from is no longer discernible.) An example of mystery meat navigation | Source Instead, you have to click on them to find out. It refers to buttons or links that don’t explain to you what they do. Mystery meat navigation is a term coined in 1998 by Vincent Flanders of the famous website Web Pages That Suck. What’s mystery meat navigation, and why’s it so bad? Whether you’re an Android user, designer, or developer, this should trouble you. But Google’s version of bottom navigation bars has a serious problem: mystery meat navigation. Left: Material Design’s bottom navigation bar | Right: iOS’s tab barīottom navigation bars are a better alternative to the hamburger menu, so their addition into Material Design should be good news. Sound familiar? That’s because bottom navigation bars have been a part of iOS’s UI library for years (they’re called tab bars in iOS). This new bar is positioned at the bottom of an app, and contains 3 to 5 icons that allow users to navigate between top-level views in an app. In March 2016, Google updated Material Design to add bottom navigation bars to its UI library. By Teo Yu Siang Material Design and the Mystery Meat Navigation Problem