• Read more about Tablet Navigation

I know what you’re thinking from the title, ”Ugh, another hamburger menu debate”, but you’d be wrong...mostly. While this post will include everyone’s favorite icon to hate, this is more of an open discussion. About what the most appropriate navigation style is when viewing your content on a tablet. Also for the sake of argument in this post let’s assume tablet = a regular iPad.

I was talking with a friend of mine the other day and he asked me this very question. He was working on some tablet wireframes and asked “What are your thoughts on tablet navigation? Should it stick with typical desktop or jump right into mobile”? Now the “right” answer of course is let your navigation/content dictate the best way for it to be displayed, but maybe that’s too simple. My first reaction was just this, if you’re viewing a site or app in a landscape orientation on your tablet then the navigation pattern should probably remain in tact in its desktop style. The tablet display has the available space to represent the full navigation in a horizontal position, and Luke Wroblewski (http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1945) has shown us that if we want engagement then we need to display our nav.

This is where things got a little interesting though, I told him that if someone made the switch from holding the tablet horizontally(landscape), to vertically(portrait) then it might make more sense at that point to switch over to a mobile navigation pattern. Chances are that when you flip your tablet vertically the viewable area is going to be too small to properly display the navigation you spent hours crafting. My friend was very adamant that the navigation pattern should remain constant on the device you’re viewing it on. He was also concerned that a typical desktop nav wouldn’t work as well as it should on a tablet. He brings up a very valid concern about consistency, should the navigation, regardless of the orientation of a device be consistent even if that means sacrificing a little usability?

So I’ll pose the question to you the reader, what is the right answer, is there a right approach? Or is this problem like every other, and should be considered on a case by case basis?

• Read more about The Internet: A Brief History

And, in keeping with his Developer DNA, the history lives on GitHub: to navigate, please use your left and right arrow keys.

Bonus: watch Ryan make a real time web app in his brief intro of AngularJS!

• Read more about The Tablet Frontier: MoDevTablet

Last April we sponsored the first MoDevUX event in Washington DC and helped facilitate some important conversations about user experience design and application development with hundreds of industry experts.

We had the opportunity to take the stage to share some of our insight gained from developing beautiful, modern mobile applications over the years. Our presentation garnered a lot of feedback and even landed us a story in InTheCapital, DC's leading online news source for tech and startups.

We're pleased to report MoDev is back in action this September with another mobile-themed conference, MoDevTablet; this round they will focus specifically on keeping pace in the tablet era.

We're excited to sponsor MoDevTablet alongside giants like Adobe, BlackBerry and Microsoft. The conference offers more than 60 workshops and presentations over three days from September 13th-15th.

Once again, Jurgen Altziebler, our Managing Director of UX, and Anthony Nystrom, a Fellow at Intridea as well as our Director of Mobile and Emerging Technology, will take the stage. This time they'll be presenting "Tablet as a Utility", and will share case studies on developing tablet applications for real world, utilitarian cases where the functionality and design of the app has to enable someone to do their job more effectively. They will cover questions like:

• How does the design of these apps differ from the design of novelty tablet applications?
• What special cases do you need to take into consideration?
• How to keep tablet in use without Wifi?
• How to accommodate for working conditions like changes in light, differences in fingernails, and extended use?

We hope you'll join us for this exciting event in DC next week! Registration is still open. Several Intrideans will be there along with Jurgen and Anthony, so it will be a great time to pick our brains about your design and development strategy. Be sure to follow us on Twitter for updates throughout the event.