Sunday, 19 December 2010

Action Bar Anti-Pattern Gallery

  Anti-pattern

Dictionary.com uses very action-bar like visuals for application navigation. Also, pushing the company logo doesn't do anything. I would recommend a redesign in this case. Use of tab component would be advisable.





TweetDeck
Anti-pattern

Otherwise amazing TweetDeck application uses a button bar for frequent actions. Use of an action bar would be recommended here. Placing control buttons at bottom of the screen has a problem on android phones. Almost all phones have the hard buttons (back, menu, home, search) just bellow the screen. This placement could cause unintended button presses.





picplz
Anti-pattern

This application uses very action-bar like concept but lacks few of the key features. It should be placed on top of the screen instead. It would also be a very good place to add some branding.



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3 comments:

  1. Anonymous4 May 2011 at 18:57

    pandora sale

    ReplyDelete
  2. yak22 September 2011 at 14:20

    Hi Juhani,

    you are writing "Almost all phones have the hard buttons (back, menu, home, search) just bellow the screen. This placement could cause unintended button presses." is there an evidence (e.g., usability study) on that or just your own experience?

    I was thinking about the Action Bar pattern (for actions) combined with the Tab Bar pattern (for navigation) like Twitter 2.0 has. Isn't it kinda the same thing - icons in 2 rows just above each other, prone to unintended presses. I guess so.

    Any thoughts?

    Sigh - Android is re-inventing wheel here. iPhone has clearly separated navigation and actions in most cases (of course they don't have hardware buttons :) )

    Thanks Martin

    ReplyDelete
  3. Juhani28 September 2011 at 01:24

    Hi Martin,
    sorry for forgetting to get back to you!

    I don't have any usability study I can refer to :( I base my opinion on Google's guidelines and dev advocate comments. IT would be great to perform such a study to get some solid evidence and see if it is really going on or not. From my personal anecdotal experience I have to say that it happens but as always anecdotal evidence is not evidence.

    I don't see tabs + action bar as problematic if the button spacing is done right. Also accidental tab navigations should not cause loss of data or critical problem... Ou how I would love to see a study about this!

    Thanks for your comments!

    ReplyDelete

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