As I haven’t designed much for tablets before, I wanted to get inspiration from other apps and see how they are structured. I also want to look at apps for books to see where they place their features.
Most of the tablet based apps that I look at make use of 3 columns. One of them is usually the navigation on the left hand side. The other 2 columns would be used for content. I think it makes sense to have the navigation on the left as it is easily accessible when the tablet is held horizontally. If it was to be at the top, it may be more difficult to reach, especially since tablets are large. It would be ideal if the column sizes stayed more or less the same for each screen for consistency. Apart from when children are reading the digital books of course as these will take up the whole screen for the best reading experience.
I like how amazon split their book selections into categories. I think I would do something similar but with different types of categories of course. The first category that would appear would be the users “Top Picks”. These would be suited towards their reading ability and interests. As they scroll down to other categories, it would become less tailored to them. There might be categories like “Most popular”, “New releases” or “Christmas books”. If a user explores these options, there will still be a match percentage to tell them how likely they are to enjoy it and how suitable it is for their reading level. This way, users are given the choice to explore other categories and make an informed decision.
They also have featured categories. Something like this could be useful if I want to separate the book selection further. Maybe the category selection is something they could choose during onboarding. This way, they get recommendations from categories they are interested in.
Spotify’s UI is a good place to take inspiration from. The home page is very visual which I like as it has images of album covers etc. You can jump straight into a song you were recently playing or view some of your top mixes. I like this as users can quickly get to the content that they are looking for.