Describe your product's structure
Enter top-level feature count, distinct user-role count, multi-step workflow count, and primary platform.
NAVIGATION PATTERN RECOMMENDATION
Nav Sketch
Enter your feature count, user-role count, and workflow count and get a recommended navigation pattern — tab bar, sidebar, or hybrid — with a navigation-complexity score.
- Uses your inputs in a transparent calculation
- Instant result with practical next steps
- No signup required
Planning guidance only. Validate important decisions with customer evidence and your delivery team.
YOUR INPUTS
Build your result
Complete every field. The result updates only when you choose Calculate.
How it works
We apply navigation threshold rules
Real rules of thumb — a mobile app with 5 or fewer sections and one role fits a tab bar, more roles or sections push toward a sidebar or hybrid pattern — decide the recommendation.
Get a pattern and a complexity score
You get a named navigation pattern plus a 0-100 navigation-complexity score reflecting feature count, role count, and workflow count.
Continue learning: MVP navigation design: keeping it simple enough · Mobile-first MVP UI design
Frequently asked questions
Does Nav Sketch generate an actual navigation design or wireframe?
No. Nav Sketch recommends a navigation pattern by name (tab bar, sidebar, or hybrid) using threshold rules applied to the counts you enter. It does not generate a visual wireframe and does not run a real AI/LLM generation step.
How is Nav Sketch different from Info Arc?
Nav Sketch recommends the navigation pattern for moving between a product's interactive features and workflows — tab bar, sidebar, or hybrid. Info Arc organizes content and feature items into categories and decides how flat or nested that organization should be. Use Nav Sketch to decide how users move through your app; use Info Arc to decide how your content and features are grouped and labeled within it.
Why does user-role count affect the recommendation?
Different roles often need different sections visible — an admin role typically needs more top-level access than a standard user. More than one role pushes the recommendation toward a sidebar or hybrid pattern, which handles role-based visibility more gracefully than a fixed tab bar.
What if my product is both mobile and desktop?
Selecting "Both" applies a blended read from the feature and role thresholds, but plan for genuinely different navigation per platform — a tab bar that works on mobile can feel wasted or restrictive on desktop, and vice versa.
Should I follow this recommendation exactly?
Treat it as an informed starting point based on your counts, not a final decision. Validate the pattern against how your specific users actually move between features, especially if usage is heavily skewed toward one or two workflows.
How We Compare
| Feature | MVPHub | Figma | Balsamiq |
|---|---|---|---|
| Navigation pattern recommendation from threshold rules | Included | Not included | Not included |
| Navigation-complexity scoring | Included | Not included | Not included |
| Design and prototype the actual navigation UI | Not included | Included | Included |
| Reusable navigation component libraries | Not included | Included | Limited |
Figma and Balsamiq are where the navigation actually gets designed and prototyped once a pattern is chosen. Nav Sketch runs earlier — a quick, rule-based recommendation for which pattern fits your product's scale before you invest design time in one direction.
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