Iterating on a Design Component

Solving key problems to enhance clarity and readability

Celine Fucci
6 min readJan 15, 2021
The subtitle “Navigation Bar” appears in caps above the title “Iteration Walkthrough” against a purple background.

Iteration is an integral part of the design process. It’s how designers work toward building a solution that meets customer needs and business objectives.

Recently, I received feedback on one of the projects in my portfolio. The feedback was in regards to a specific design component in one of my mockups. In order to incorporate and learn from this feedback, I thought it would be beneficial to walkthrough how I would approach iteration. Although this process may be unique to this specific component, it will help me focus on some key concepts that I might have been neglecting while designing interfaces.

Hope you enjoy!

Component Details

The component I’ll be redesigning in this article is called a navigation bar (Google Material Design Guidelines) or a tab bar (Apple Human Interface Guidelines) and it usually sits at the bottom or top of an app screen depending on how it’s designed.

A bottom tab bar with 4 options: photos, memories, shared, and albums. Albums — the Active State — is highlighted in blue.
A bottom tab bar in Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines
A bottom navigation bar with 4 options and a purple background. The music tab is highlighted to signify the Active State.
A bottom navigation bar in Google’s Material Design Guidelines

Purpose

A tab/navigation bar allows users to seamlessly transition between different sections of an app.

Best Practice

This component works best when it contains 3–5 items (at least on mobile devices). According to Apple’s Guidelines, “A tab bar may contain any number of tabs, but the number of visible tabs varies based on the device size and orientation.”

Current State

With some baseline info out of the way, let’s now look at the current state of my component.

A tab bar with 3 options: goals, my impact, and lifestyle. The icons are bright purple set against a dark indigo background.
Current tab bar

Questioning and Identifying Areas of Improvement

  • Does readability take a backseat here? Both the icons and text are rather small
  • The icons look to be incorporating a two-tone style, but is that the right decision?
  • Is there a clear differentiation between Active and Focus states? Doesn’t look like it.
  • Are there any systems in place here? Let’s incorporate a grid, consistent spacing and a clearer layout.
  • Is this consistent with interaction and UI patterns seen in other apps?

Iteration Process

Now that we’ve identified what could be improved, let’s iterate.

Step 1: Set up guides/rulers (I’m using the iPhone X/XS/11 Pro dimensions of 375 x 812 here)

Two screens side-by-side depicting where to place UI elements and guides/rulers for several iPhone devices.
Guides/rulers for the iPhone X/XS/11 Pro

Step 2: Configure grid (I’m using the 8pt system)

An iPhone screen highlighting the 8pt grid system in red.
8pt grid system for an iPhone

Step 3: Since we’ll have 3 tabs in this example, lets create bounding boxes for each tab

We can do this by dividing the screen width by 3 (375 / 3 = 125). This means the bounding box for each tab has a width of 125.

3 tabs — 125px each — in red, blue, and yellow respectively.
Bounding boxes for tabs

Step 4: Above, we mentioned consistent UI patterns between apps. Let’s do some research into how other apps are laying out information.

My favorite place to go for this is mobbin.design.

Here’s what I found through my research:

  • A common pattern is to have an icon with a label
  • Some apps opt not to use a label, but I think we’re better off using a label to add extra clarity to our tab bar
  • The inactive tabs are hard to read and present accessibility issues. To solve this, some apps highlighted the active tab with a brand color while maintaining a successful color contrast for the inactive tabs.

Example: Google News

The Google News mobile app on iOS with the “Headlines” tab highlighted in blue as the Active State.
Source: Mobbin.design

Moving forward, I like Airbnb’s implementation of the tab bar. There seems to be sufficient spacing between the icon and the text label.

The Airbnb mobile app on iOS with the “Saved” tab highlighted in pink as the Active State.
Source: Mobbin.design

Step 5: Now that I have a good idea of how I want to redesign my tab bar, let’s move on to picking an icon set.

There are a ton of icon sets out there, but one I always gravitate towards is Google’s Material Icons. To keep things simple, we’ll use those. There are multiple styles we could use (filled, outlined, rounded, two-tone, sharp) so let’s turn to the Material Design Guidelines to look up some best practices.

After analyzing some of the other elements and brand principles of the app I’m designing this tab bar for, I decided to go with the filled + rounded material icons because not only is my interface dark and heavy, but it contains circular elements and curves.

Step 6: Icon + Label Size

Icon Size: We’ll stick with 24 x 24 dp, since that’s the standard size for icons in Google Material Design.

Label Size: On mobile devices, 16px is the default font size, so we’ll use that. You can also play around with font weight and casing. Since my interface is already dark, I think sticking with sentence case for my tab labels will be best.

It’s also worth it here to look into Keyline Shapes in Google’s documentation. Here’s how Google defines them:

Keyline shapes are the foundation of the grid. By using these core shapes as guidelines, you can maintain consistent visual proportions across system icons.

This is a term I originally missed while perusing the documentation. I’m pretty sure Keyline Shapes are guidelines for creating icons from scratch, so I don’t need to worry about them here (but correct me if I’m wrong). Just to be certain, I found these Figma files to help me line up my icons with keylines:

Step 7: Remember those bounding boxes we created above?

It’s now time to place each icon and label in the center of those boxes.

3 tabs (goals, my impact, lifestyle) in red, blue, and yellow respectively.
Tab bounding boxes with icons and labels horizontally centered

Step 8: Customize as necessary

The last step is to tweak the colors and vertical spacing in between the icon and label to your liking, but be careful not to ruin the center alignment.

The new tab bar design with an indigo background and the goals tab highlighted in periwinkle as the Active State.
The new tab bar design

I also like to further prioritize systematic practices by aligning labels to the baseline grid. And, as often as you can, work in spacing, padding, and margin increments of 4 or 8.

An arrow pointing to the use of a baseline grid to align text.
Baseline grid

Last, feel free to use Figma’s auto-layout and variants features when making components. And don’t forget to properly group and name your layers.

The layers panel in Figma showing the tab bar component grouped and named successfully.
Layers panel in Figma

Results

Before and After

A before and after comparison of the tab bar component in question throughout this article.
Tab bar — before vs. after
The new tab bar design with an indigo background and the goals tab highlighted in periwinkle as the Active State.
Redesigned tab bar

Looking at this design, I could also use the volt green brand color to make the Active State more noticeable.

Another tab bar design, this time with an indigo background and the goals tab highlighted in volt green as the Active State.
New tab bar with green as the Active State

Regardless, this tab bar would definitely take some user testing to perfect.

What other iterations would you make?

P.S. If you’ve made it this far and are hiring Product, UI, or UX designers, I’m looking for work. Connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter.

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Celine Fucci
Celine Fucci

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