I don’t even want to link to this awful design stance I read, where a UI designer boldly refuses to design apps with tab bars, claiming tab bars rob users the chance to create their own mental maps.
If you watch users open any app for the first time, you’ll notice how many of them are hesitant to tap something they don’t immediately understand.
Inventive user interfaces that rely on clever gestures and transitions between areas, with navigational elements that don’t follow the system paradigm—which users are familiar with—are scary, even if inspirational to a certain crowd. In contrast, tab bars offer reassurance. Tabs are one of the most common and widely understood UI elements.
Obviously not every app needs a tab bar; however, I urge all designers to pick up an old iPhone running iPhone OS 1–3, and learn from it. Understand what made that so successful. Try to understand why it made sense to almost everyone in an intuitive sense. Then, look at apps today. Older apps were designed for quick task completion. For efficiency. We gave them the quickest routes to features they were looking for to save them time. But now, many apps have an opposite business goal. It became a priority to keep users inside apps for as long as possible, at the expense of their attention, intention, and memory.
The problem is that tab bars eroded over time. Instagram spearheaded a trend of placing an action inside a tab bar and removing the labels. They conflated toolbars and tab bars, making users confused about which were actions and which were tabs. Before hamburger buttons that opened side menus, tab bars offered a place to view “more” tabs, with the option to customize the tab bar to fit the mental model of the user.
To be clear, tab bars didn’t remove the opportunity for users to create their own mental map. It literally once gave them the chance to make their model the user interface itself. The “More” tab in the iPod app let every user decide for themselves what the app was for and how they would like to navigate through it.
When done correctly, tab bars are familiar, useful, and friendly. The only reason to avoid them is because you want a user to get lost.

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