Navigating through app with follow-up screens

Question

For my internship assignment I'm making a (iOS) reporting app for a client that will be used in-house. My client and I both have little experience in the design of iOS. I went to my client with paper prototypes to test the flow of the app, however he suggested an alternative way to navigate through the app.

My initial idea is shown below, in the top-right image. My clients idea was the top-left image. My mentor suggested to perhaps allow multiple ways of navigation, like swiping and a button.

The idea of my client makes it hard for me to get a consistent look, mainly because of the lack of space in the navigation bar, so I'm prone to advise him to not go with that.

Due to my lack of experience I find it hard to come up with proper advise and good arguments, other than "I've never seen that before". In my eyes either way has quite an impact on the eventual user experience.

• What is best practise when it comes to navigating through multiple follow-up screens?
• What way of navigation could be most benefitial?

Things like Segments/Tabs are not an option because there are too many screens.

I added some mockups below to clarify what I'm after.

Answer 1

To give you some arguments:

There is this thing that a users thumb is often only half the size of their phones screen. Depending on the way they hold it, it can be hard to reach the top navigation.

For that reason your solution will be better.

A popular way of hiding a lot of links to a lot of different pages is the drawer menu, hamburger menu or off canvas menu (however you would like to name it). My problem with this is:

Out of sight is out of mind

Smarter people than me have deduced that in their applications some functionalities weren't used that often and when they switched to the action bar menu (your solution) or the segmented tabs engagement sky rocketed and users even complimented on the new functionalities that were there in the beginning.

My solution would be to use the action bar menu for the primary actions and... I want to tell you where to put any secondary actions, but it is not at all clear to me what your application does. So here is something based on an assumption:

^{download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups}

I made a vertical list instead of pages or cards that can be swiped through. Again with the notion: "out of sight is out of mind".

So in short "reach of thumb" and "out of sight is out of mind" are two arguments I can up with right now that might assist you in convincing your client.

Hope this helps.