Analysis

Bottom navigation is the new black

Posted in Analysis, Design, My Work on February 2nd, 2011 by bradleymu – Be the first to comment

I’m finally working on my portfolio website.  It’s 1:15 AM, today was the first day of my last semester, I’m tired and I just finished peer reviews from our last semester.  But I finally fully formed this thought that’s been bouncing around my head for a couple months now; I had to write it down.

Bottom navigation is how we’ll navigate web pages and apps in the future.  We’re already seeing it.  Top navigation has seen its day.

Web pages are moving to web apps.  We can all agree on that.  But for those who haven’t thought about how these new spaces will be designed, think about your iPhone, the navigation bar is typically, if not always, along the bottom.  Look at your Mac (not to plug Apple products too much) where is the dock located?  Along the bottom, unless you’re one of those rebels who has put it on the left side.

As we, as users, become more accustomed to apps, the design of our web pages will follow.  Scrolling will go and so will top navigation.  Our apps and web sites will have top and bottom navigation; the best using bottom navigation.  Scrolling will be minimal.  The top and bottom navigation bars will be static, between which is displayed the information we seek.  We’ll zoom and toggle.  Bits and pieces will be presented to us.  We can have them assembled into the big picture if we wish and vice versa.

Scrolling = searching.  And searching takes time.  As our information structures become more sophisticated and as we catalog information better, the need for scrolling goes out the window.  At some point we’ll no longer need scrolling so it’ll get chucked.  And if we aren’t scrolling then why not have an additional, helpful bit of functionality along the bottom of whatever screen you’re viewing?

Whether or not this idea is revolutionary, particularly insightful or even accurate, I do think it is valid.  Scrolling is a hassle, clicking is a hassle.  We’ll shift to showing users more information in a way that can be digested faster.  Scrolling and clicking gums up the works.  A fixed top and bottom navigation bar provides a frame and forces designers to present information in a way that demands less scrolling.

And I can’t wait.  I can’t stand scrolling.

The Status Quo is the Enemy.

Posted in Analysis, Critique, Design, My Work on November 22nd, 2010 by bradleymu – Be the first to comment

*Posted in my Elon blog on November 21, 2010 in response to 30 Conversations on Design.

To be a designer, does one have to be liberal?  Gone are the days when a designer focuses solely on form or function or fusing the two.  Now it seems designers are uniformly liberal.  Whether it’s Emily Pilloton who currently lives in Bertie County, North Carolina, trying to use design in the classroom to better educate children in a broken education system or it’s Tina Roth Eisenberg who wants to bring clean water to those with insufficient access, designers are progressive.  They seek to change, to empower, to inform.  The status quo is the enemy.

Designer as liberal.  It’s like the chicken or the egg.  Does the profession push designers to a liberal mindset or are liberals drawn to the field?  Or neither?  Or both?

I think it’s both.  I can’t imagine a designer seeking to maintain the status quo.  To enlighten someone or empower someone…it’s like a mini-revolution.  Think about suppressed populations throughout the history of the world that weren’t taught to read.  Their inability to empower themselves enslaved their minds as much as their bodies.  For the suppressors, ignorance is bliss; it’s also irresponsible.

Designers seek to inform people, shine light on their ignorances (either of choice or neglect).

The process of design is the cognitive action of deciding how something should be.  In order to design, one must fully understand what they are designing, how and why it will be used.

From this total understanding comes the knowledge that what they’re designing is more than just form and function, designers understand it’s the ability to educate people.

As I’ve been writing this piece, I’ve been jumping back and forth between “design of product/tangible object and ideas/conventions of thought.”  I realize I’m really speaking to design of ideas, information and conventions of thought. As the Internet takes it’s place in our lives, design comes with it.  In fact, it may be more important than ever. Information must be designed to adequately exist at our fingertips.  But as information is designed rather than simply presented, it’s relevance and power increases.

Designers understand this shift.  As information becomes more ubiquitous, as more individuals can collect and disseminate information, those who understand the weight design can potentially carry see design as a means to an end.

So yes, activists and liberals probably are drawn to design.  And the nature of design requires those working in the field to always push the envelope.  But as a designer must fully understand from every possible angle what he or she is designing, I can’t help but wonder if the term activist or liberal is a mis-label and that those who would be labeled as such, are simply informed.