Tabs or Filter dropdowns?
I'm currently building a note taking app and one of the screens uses tabs to separate subsections. A lot of the feedback I've been getting is confusion around the tabs, that the tabs make the screen cluttered, and that they're not used very often (people primarily stay on the default subsection).
This is making me think that I should replace the tabs with a filter dropdown instead. The other subsections are useful, but only after using the app for a long time. So making them less prominent for new users seems like the right decision.
Curious to hear how other people may have decided between using a filter dropdown vs tabs in their apps.
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Question to your question, how many filters are there? Between 1-5 or 5-50?
There are 3 filters.
Got you. If there were more than 5, I would say use a dropdown. But because there are less than 5, I say use tabs.
My personal preference as a user is to have UI components that minimize the number of taps/clicks to get to where I need to go, so in this case it sounds like tabs would do that
Yeah but the times you need to actually perform those clicks are fairly rare. So the tabs reduce clicks for an uncommon interaction while cluttering the UI (or at least that is how it seems).