Paging view within a productivity App navigation hierarchy.

Question

The Apple UI design guide suggests that a UIPageControl is ideal for presenting the top view of a utility app.

Would a paging view that appears at the 2nd or 3rd level down inside the main UINavigationController view trigger a fail during the App review process?

In my App I have inserted a 3 page view at the second navigation level down in my productivity style app. Each page presents a question and requires an answer that might by a multichoice tick or text box entry. The questions could be stacked vertically in a multi-section table but in my prototype flicking through the questions horizontally feels very natural.

However I have not seen an App store program that uses paging as I have.

Answer 1

Although you will probably not fail app review, I believe using a UIPageControl may be confusing to your users. As you pointed out, I can't think of any apps using the UIPageControl in this manner. The following quote from the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines is informative:

A page indicator gives users a quick way to see how many views are open and an indication of the order in which they were opened; it does not help users keep track of the steps they took through a hierarchy of views. Because the views in a utility application tend to be peers of each other, a page indicator is sufficient to help users navigate through them. A productivity application that displays hierarchical information, on the other hand, should offer navigation through the elements in the navigation bar (for more on this, see “Navigation Bars”).

From your description of how this portion of your app is supposed to display, it doesn't sound like these pages with questions on them would be considered 'multiple views'. In addition, you probably want your users to answer each question sequentially and move on to the next. The UIPageControl is designed so that a user can switch between any of the views in any order they choose, not only in one direction.

This sounds much more like a hierarchical design, and this portion of your app would probably work a lot better if you used a navigation bar along with a UITableView. Requiring your users to answer a question by tapping a multichoice tick box, and then make them figure out that they need to swipe in a certain direction to get to the next question would not be obvious to a user, and could be much more intuitive. For example, as soon as the user selects a tick box, you could just programmatically navigate to the next question. Or, have a button at the bottom of each screen that's labelled "Next Question", which would transition to the next screen.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

I asked Apple a similar question recently and got back:

"Thank you for contacting the iPhone Developer Program. Apple is not able to provide pre-approval to developers for proposed application submissions."

In the end it really depends on the reviewer, the specifics of your app, full moon, etc.

Personally, I would simply try it. If the interface looks good and you think it will not confuse users, then just submit it.

Also, being rejected for stuff like that is not the end of the world. You just have to replace it with something similar. Happened to me once or twice. It is usually not a complete blocker.