#WP7Dev app feedback #4

Here's the feedback I recently gave to the creator of an app.

This is part of my series of app reviews.

In summary, I said it was "a lovely simple app which is well executed. It has impressive performance in terms of the speed of loading remote data."

Here's the feedback:

• In the Marketplace description, some names are not capitalized correctly.
• The highlight effect you have applied to the application icon is similar to the effect automatically applied to most iPhone apps. I would recommend removing this highlighting from the icon image so the app looks like it belongs on the platform.
• I like the splash screen image but the logo it displays doesn't seem to match the branding of the rest of the app (apart from the color).
• While I like the color you have used in the app I wonder if it's everyone's favourite. Have you considered using the phone accent color for this? It may help the user gain a greater sense of ownership of, affinity for and connection with the app.
• Add tombstoning support to remember the selected pivot item and scroll position in that item.
• There is no need to include the same options in both the application bar and the application menu.
• I would recommend only including the "reload" option on the application bar. I would expect that this would be a frequently used option and having it always available will be helpful. Having it in the application menu makes it harder to access as it requires an extra tap and therefore takes slightly longer.
• I would expect that the settings would be rarely accessed and so access to this functionality should be moved to the application menu so it doesn't distract or get pressed accidentally.
• The convention for pivot item headers is for them to be entirely lower case. You should adjust "About" and "Settings" accordingly.
• Add tombstoning support to remember which of the "About" or "Settings" pivot items were displayed when returning to the app. Remembering scroll position would also be good too.
• The Settings screen has application bar items which are duplicated in the application bar menu. There is no need for this duplication.
• On the setting screen there should be no need to have a cancel button which just closes the current page/navigates backwards. The back button on the phone does this already.
• On the setting screen there is no need to have a Save button as the selected options are automatically remembered applied.
• The entire application bar can therefore be entirely removed from the settings screen.
• The about screen also has an application bar with save and cancel options but these don't relate to anything on screen.
• On the about screen I would recommend making the email address stand out more to make it more obvious that it can be tapped to trigger sending an email. Colouring the email address with the phone accent color and increasing it's size would be my recommendation.
• In the email created from the about screen, you may want to include the version number of the application. This will likely be helpful to you when investigating any reported error or problem.