To show or not to show the pivot title in Windows Phone 7 application?

Question

I am developing a client for one relatively popular online service among certain auditory. This service has a unique functionality and design, so it's difficult to confuse it with something else.

Every good pivot application I have ever seen has a title with it's name in it. It takes a lot of precious place and doesn't have any use at all (compared to system tray or pivot header). It just reminds user what is he using at the moment.

And I can't decide, show it or not. Will I miss some kind of application promotion or something, if I remove the title? Will someone google "Blah-blah application", if he sees it on someone else's screen? I can't imagine me doing that.

I'd appreciate all advice on this.

Answer 1

I personally cannot think of a scenario that you don't need a title for your pivot page. Actually, I think you will need a title for any individual page in a windows phone app.

Scenario 1

If your pivot page is your front page, the most obvious way to show the user which app he's currently running is to display a title. For example on the screenshot below you can tell it's Outlook not Gmail or Hotmail by looking at its title.

Scenario 2

If this pivot page is a detailed page for a certain item, you need to display this item's name as the title to let the user know which item he's currently viewing.

The title of a pivot page is actually quite small, I don't think you will earn that much of space by removing it. Also IMHO I think metro UI looks too similar & plain sometimes. For example the Google Mail and Hotmail pages look all most the same. To make the title not so boring you can probably try displaying a meanful icon along with the text (like how the offical Twitter client does, displaying their logo plus your username).

Anyway some people might have different ideas and this is just how I feel about it. :)

Answer 2

In my opinion pivotitems in the way they are used now are fully 'Metro' style, it help you give applications a consistent look/feel/navigation with the OS integrated apps aswell as apps from the marketplace. However you're not forced to use a pivotitem, or fill in a title. (I'm not sure if you change the size of the title, but otherwise you could probably build your own pivotcontrol in silverlight.)

You don't miss any application promotion because you're not forced to use the pivotitem