Uniform page shuffle for Windows Phone

[ This article is for Windows Phone 8 developers. If you’re developing for Windows 10, see the latest documentation. ]

The Uniform Page Shuffle navigation model is for the case where you have pages of info to present where each page looks exactly the same, but the data differs on each. Think of it like a deck of flash cards: There’s no hierarchy and you simply flick through the pages. To implement this, you would use the Pivot control. For example, you might build an app that displays the baseball card images for your favorite team. Each page has the same layout with the player’s picture, name, and stats.

This type of app is easy to use, and all of the page space can be dedicated to the content to show the data. The following example shows an app that allows you to move from page to page, viewing the same info layout but for different data. The example has scores for different sports leagues.

Sports Scores apps

You might want to allow for reordering to minimize the problem of the user having to traverse all of the pages all of the time. For example, in a weather app, you could allow users to decide the ordering of the cities to flip through—showing weather for the city they live in and then favorite vacation spots after that, and so on.

Use this navigation model where you have a single type of data to provide and there’s no need for any hierarchy or complex data navigation. It’s simple to add pages and settings for them.

User configuration

A useful app that uses the Uniform Page Shuffle style of interaction will most likely allow users to add more pages to be displayed. In the case of the weather app, the user would want to add more cities to monitor. You would need to provide a settings page to allow for that. Remember also to add the capability to delete pages that the user no longer cares about. An Application Bar along the bottom could be used to access these actions.