As we all get more comfortable using mobile apps in our everyday personal and working lives, we are demanding more functionality from them. But the very simplicity of using mobile apps has been one of their greatest strengths that attracts us to keep using them.
So how do we increase the complexity and functionality of the apps we design, while retaining the ease-of-use vital to an engaging user experience for their on-going use? This article will show you how ViziApps new Sliding Panel feature provides complex app navigation that is very easy for the user to access and use.
Slide Panel
You have no doubt used a slide panel in the mobile apps that you interact with every day – it can be seen in mobile apps for Facebook, Google Drive, LinkedIn, Box, and many others. Look in the top-left corner of the app, and you’ll see a slide panel icon. Sometimes it’s a company logo, sometimes it’s the ubiquitous stacked-menu icon, and sometimes a combination of these.
Tap on the menu icon, and the Slide Menu appears from the left of the screen. The menu shows a list of app pages that the user can navigate to. Since the menu icon takes very little of the screen’s real estate, it’s very unobtrusive, yet it’s in a familiar position so users can find it easily.
The list of menu items can be arbitrarily long, which the user can scan through quickly by scrolling, so this is how the set of app features can expand without burdening the user with the feeling of complexity.
To build a Slide Panel into your ViziApps app, click on the Slide Panel field button in the ViziApps Studio. You can enter a list of menu selections, and then for each selection, specify the page that the app will turn to when the user taps on that selection. Finally, create a menu button using your own image or one of our many stock images, and for the user action select “Show slide panel”.