After so many years of popularization of smartphones, the basic style of the app has long been finalized, and it is difficult for so many designers from large manufacturers to innovate.
For example, the bottom navigation is basically this style of icon and text, whether it is domestic or foreign. Because Android and Apple iOS systems have always been standardized like this:
上图来源：Material Design 2
I thought there was no way to innovate with these basic design frameworks...... However, in recent years, it has been found that more and more apps in China have begun to switch to text-only bottom navigation.
For example, the Meitu App:
For example, Keep:
Which is better, text-only bottom navigation or traditional icon text navigation?
I changed the bottom navigation of Xiaohongshu and Dianping from plain text to icon and text, let's compare it:
Little Red Book (before revision)
Little Red Book (Revised)
Dianping (before revision)
Dianping (revised)
Of course, there are also pure icons to navigate, for example, Zhihu has been changed to the following picture. Personally, I don't guess what the positive and penultimate icons do.
Zhihu (before revision)
Zhihu (revised)
Which of these three bottom navigation styles is the clearest and easier to understand, let's vote:
Which navigation style is the clearest and most understandable radio selection
Icon + text
Text-only
Pure icons
voting
Those apps that change the bottom navigation to plain text form are obviously not trying to save trouble. Their designers should have decided to break the original design framework after repeated deliberation and comparison.
This decision was not easy, as this kind of text-only navigation has never been recommended for either iOS or Android.
What are the norms?
For example, the same Material Design design specifications from Google as Android, among the various bottom navigation styles listed, there are only pure icons and no plain text:
Image source: https://m3.material.io/components/navigation-bar/specs
Later to add, avoid using pure icons:
Image source: https://m3.material.io/components/navigation-bar/guidelines
I'm talking about Material Design 3, which was updated in 2021.
Previously, Material Design 2 also proposed another approach, that is, only the icon, and the text description will appear after it is selected:
What about Apple's iOS system?
Their design specs only give the bottom navigation style of icon + text, and they don't even show the style of pure icons.
Image source: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/tab-bars
However, the navigation in VisionOS is slightly different, the default pure icons are arranged vertically, and the text only appears when the eye looks.
All in all, neither Apple nor Google's designers seem to have considered the possibility of text-only navigation, and have hardly mentioned it for so many years.
In fact, there are almost no mainstream overseas apps that use plain text to navigate, and they are basically based on icons + text.
Airbnb
There are a few pure icons:
Tinder
Why is it rarely used abroad
Text-only navigation?
Maybe it's because English is too long, and it's really hard to arrange horizontally in a narrow mobile phone interface.
I tried to draw it, how do you feel it?
Airbnb (before modified)
Airbnb (modified)
In fact, most of the languages in this world are longer than Chinese.
For example, there are only 26 types of English letters, and in order to express rich content, many letters need to be used to create words.
In fact, Japanese (kana) and Korean are similar to English in that they are composed of purely phonetic units, and each character represents a unique and exact pronunciation.
There are 46 Japanese (kana) and 40 Korean, which is a bit more alphabet than English, so there are fewer words needed to make words.
上图来源: Weekly Jalan
Image source: Naver
By the way, there is only one word under the second icon in the picture above, which is actually home transliterated in Korean.
The number of commonly used characters in Chinese is as high as two or three thousand, plus the number of infrequently used characters can reach 100,000.
Therefore, Chinese words can be very short, usually 2 words are enough, and it is not impossible to concise a word. And 4 words can tell the story turn, such as "unclear and powerful", "thinking carefully and terrifying" and so on.
The influence of language on design style is actually quite large, I also wrote an article before, discussing that Western minimalist style may not be suitable for us Chinese designers: don't just learn foreign minimalist design
It seems that among the major languages in the world, only Chinese is really suitable for text-only navigation.
That's where the problem comes in. Nowadays, many apps are engaged in globalization or multi-language support, for example, Alipay not long ago provided a one-click translation function for foreigners:
It's okay to use plain text for the bottom navigation of the domestic app, but it won't work to go to sea. So there are two options:
The first is to unify the interface at home and abroad, and abandon the text-only bottom navigation;
The second is to use plain text for navigation in China, and the traditional icon and text style for overseas versions.
Which option, in your opinion, is better? Is it necessary to do a separate text-only navigation for the domestic version?