| # Calypso IA Model | |
| Calypso’s navigation architecture model is based on two key pieces: | |
| 1. Master bar | |
| 2. Left-to-Right | |
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| The [Masterbar](https://intenseminimalism.com/2013/the-master-bar-pattern-design-and-usage/) is the top-level piece of all our UIs across all the devices. It’s designed to work at desktop size, mobile size, web, iOS and Android alike. | |
| The Left-to-Right logic instead means that everything else goes from a higher level of abstraction on the left, to a lower level of abstraction on the right, or from step 1 on the left and step N on the right. **Imagine the viewport to be a window on an horizontal sheet of paper that moves around based on what needs to be focused.** | |
| My Sites is the clearest example we have so far: you access to it from the masterbar, then on the very left the first column is the list of sites, followed by the navigation menu for the site / all sites, then the content of that page, and then each section can dig further to the right. | |
| This model works because the screen size determines only how many column are shown at each time: on desktop and tablet we show two (we could show more on bigger screens) and on mobile it’s just a standard drill down navigation from one column to the other. Always left-to-right, always big sheet sliding under the display. | |
| We gain also the flexibility to focus on a specific column / view depending on where you’re coming from. For example when you switch to My Sites we can select the menu on mobile, instead of content which is primary on desktop. | |
| The animations are meant to support this mental model, although this is still a work in progress. | |
| ## Effective to Design Multi-Screen | |
| The model above is born to convert well to multiple devices and screens, so the main benefit of it is that following it allows a more seamless translation between the different screens and platforms, while already mapping to the platform standards. | |
| So this is the current Calypso information architecture, mapped to the masterbar: | |
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| And this is how it translates multi platform: | |
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| It’s exactly the same structure, declined on different platform standards. It’s the ideal (and hard) balance between platform standards and our WordPress.com brand. | |