iOS expected Back navigation

So i am busy working away building a cross platform, phone and tablet, android and iOS experience and need some input. I don’t have an iPhone so i don’t have alot of personal experience to draw from. I know i could read the apple human interface guides to tell me how the back button should work, but i want to hear for actual users of apps.

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Here is my app with the default out of the box back navigation, to me that top bar looks ugly as, now on android i am able to just remove the bar and rely on users having been trained for years to use the hardware back button, on iOS if i remove the bar completely the default behaviour is to swipe in from the left side to navigate back.

Is this a commonly known/used interface pattern? If i keep the bar, match the colour and remove the back text it looks better to me, but is that something that people are familiar with? other ideas/suggestions are welcome.

(note i know that design wise everything looks terrible, most of the UI is placeholder at the moment)

Yes. I use several apps with this behavior.

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There may be some apps that do this, but I feel that they’re definitely in the territory of non-standard oddballs. Even in highly customised user interfaces, there’s at least some indication that back is to the left. In the absence of the back indicator arrow, I would expect some sort of slide-over menu. The only exception may be if you present no other information in that header area.

Whilst it may not look good to you, I think it’s generally better to provide at least a bit of hinting to the user. The only case where I’d say it’s safe to go wild is if you know your users will be highly-experienced and more accustomed to purely-gestural interfaces.

So it may be okay to unify the colour and even remove the ‘Back’ text, but I would leave the back arrow at least. Depending on the content, it may be safe to hide the extra bits as you scroll up the content.

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Yeah I was definitely going to keep the arrow indicator, I think I will keep it persistent at the top rather then remove the bar on scroll.

At the moment I have no other planned content for the header area other then back button indicaton, so I need to experiment with what feels right.

I am trying to experiment with just treating glass as glass, and developing a consistent experience while also feeling platform native, it’s surprisingly hard.

Good luck! I don’t envy you making the decisions; it’s much easier to sit here and spout off opinions :laughing:

Platform native would definitely mean having that top bar. Most apps use it for the same [Back – Title – Edit] set, but there’s some play. Looking through most of my apps, I can only find a couple that break with this in any extreme way though, Safari being the most notable.

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It’s standard, expected behavior. If you support swipe gestures, that’ll be even better.