One year of UI Design – Day 5
April 4, 2014When I was working on the vertical menu yesterday, I turned my Philips light on with the remote control which happens to be round. That got me thinking. We always have our navigation horizontal or vertical, but you almost never see it round.
One company that has a non-traditional way of navigation is Vodafone. In their new app you navigate by dragging bubbles to the centre. I had to get used to it the first time, but from then it felt natural and very fast. I really like it when people are thinking out of the box like that and create a tool to do the same thing in a new way.
This morning I made some quick sketches of the round menu. I think it would be cool to have the logo in the centre surrounded by the menu items. This will create a direct connection between the company’s identity and the different parts of the website.
There are (at least) two ways of doing this: with icons or with text. The benefits of using icons is that it looks nice and clean. The downside might be that you probably need tooltips with text for when people don’t understand the icon. If you use text in the buttons there is no need for tooltips, but you have to be careful not to turn the text on the bottom upside down and require people to turn around their screen to be able to read it. My preference would be to use the icons.
Categorised in: Inspiration, Sketch, UI Design