GoKawiilTaylor Kerns / Android Authority
This week, Google’s been widely rolling out a bit of an interesting design tweak in Google Photos on Android. The app’s navigation bar — the strip near the bottom of the screen that gives users quick access to important destinations throughout the app — has been updated, replacing the familiar ribbon-style bar with a floating pill shape, plus a separate circular button to access the app’s search functionality.
It’s not an especially major change, but I do think it’s a good one, making Photos look more modern and providing a more predictable navigation experience. After seeing the new navigation bar in Photos, I’m convinced it’d be an improvement in most of Google’s apps.
Do you like Google Photos' new navigation bar? 24 votes Yes, it looks great! 71 % No, I'm not a fan. 17 % I really don't care either way. 13 %
I like this navigation bar better
Taylor Kerns / Android Authority
The new nav bar is an improvement in a few ways. For one, it’s smaller. Compared to the old version, the new pill-shaped bar saves a lot of screen real estate by shaving off large chunks of empty space, now showing the app’s content below and beside the bar. It’s also easier to understand without context. The older version of the navigation bar would disappear when you scrolled through your photos, reappearing when you scrolled back up. That’s not exactly complicated by modern UI standards, but it’s not very intuitive, either: as you scroll, most of the content on your screen moves up, while the navigation bar shifts down and out of sight. Eliminating unused negative space around the bar and fixing it in place is a clever solution that still doesn’t cover too much of the app’s content.
Photos’ three main views, Photos, Collections, and Create, are all grouped together inside the main pill-shaped nav bar. As you cycle through the three views, the UI near the top of the app stays consistent, and the nav bar remains fixed, while the content between the two fades in and out. A detached, circular search button lives to the right of the pill; tapping it slides in the search view (which doesn’t include any of the UI from the other views) from the right edge of the screen. It all feels logical and satisfying to move through.
Most of Google's apps are still using the older version Photos just moved away from.
This more modern type of navigation bar is also popping up in non-Google apps. Oura switched from a ribbon-style nav bar to a floating pill late last year, and Proton Mail puts message controls in a fixed-position pill-shaped container at the bottom of the screen (though that’s not a navigation bar). Those are just examples on my own phone; there must be plenty more, too.
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