Besides stylistic changes to make the app more consistent with my Hangouts redesign, I chose to display content in a much more visual way than the existing YouTube for iPhone, similar to the approach taken by the current Android app. Particularly when it comes to a curated list such as My Subscriptions, the video thumbnail and title matter much more than the additional metadata. This was also an opportunity to simplify each cell to remove the three(!) overflow menus each.

Navigation Structure

Apart from look and feel, the most prominent change I made was switching the primary navigation to a tab bar. The existing YouTube apps (both iPhone and Android) use navigation drawers to hold top-level items, playlists, and your subscriptions for relatively quick access to most things. But it can be improved.

Note: Android is an entirely different situation, since tabs are used differently on the platform, and a nav drawer is part of the Material design guidelines, leading to higher adoption and discoverability.

The tab bar vs. navigation drawer debate has raged for centuries (or at least since Facebook and Path popularized its use), and I’ve historically advocated for both sides. But the more I think about the topic, the more I think it’s time to kill the navigation drawer on iOS for good. Here are a couple things to consider:

Information Architecture

The number one argument I’ve seen for using a navigation drawer over a tab bar is that the IA is too complicated to be pared down to 4 or 5 tab bar items. But in most cases, that’s not true. It’s a product designer’s responsibility to think through each navigation item. Can Settings and Account be combined? Do Tags need their own navigation item, or are they a filter in another section? Does Feature X need to be top-level? Throwing navigation items into a drawer is easy and requires little thought, while using a tab bar forces you to think about the relationships between those items and their relative priority. This leads to an overall benefit to the user; less clutter, less confusion, and primary sections available from anywhere with a single tap.

If you decide your information architecture is perfect, or you revise it and you’re still left with more than 5 top-level navigation items, you can still use a tab bar. Even if you have an unreasonable number of top-level navigation items *cough* Facebook *cough*, you can include a More tab and call it a day. Yes, in many ways it’s exactly like a navigation drawer, or perhaps the more aptly named “junk drawer”, but at least you’re still prioritizing and surfacing four primary sections that would have been hidden away otherwise, and giving a text label to the ambiguous hamburger or “…” icon.

Focus

Perhaps more importantly, though, is focus. Does your iPhone app need complete feature parity with your web app? Can your product’s features be grouped by context, and if so, do your users need Feature X in a mobile context? On a phone, where screen real estate is limited, the interface can quickly get crowded. Every feature you add, and every action you add, makes the app more complex by adding clutter. Again, it’s a product designer’s responsibility to think about each one and whether or not it’s worth the extra complexity.