In Ionic the tabs need to be hooked up to an Angular directive that helps bring in an external file of tab content.
Here are the docs on the tabs: http://ionicframework.com/docs/components/#tabs and those docs pretty much just tell you how to style the tab-items and tab-bar, etc. For "making it actually work", they direct you to here: http://ionicframework.com/docs/api/directive/ionTabs/ And all of that is well and good if you are breathing Angular and Ionic ever day. But if you are approaching it for the first time, it's a lot to take in.
This tutorial may help: https://blog.nraboy.com/2014/12/understanding-tabs-ionic-framework/
Long story short: the tab content is included via a second external file. And this will have to be coded up by hand. The Design View doesn't have the features needed to do this all via drag-and-drop. It does for Bootstrap tabs and a few other frameworks where tabs are just simple HTML constructs, but not for Ionic with its more sophisticated approach.
Hope this helps,
Chris
