In building out the pages for the Real Estate Inspector application the first step is to think through the core pages that make up the application. The following navigation flow diagram illustrates the four pages that would make up the phone application. In this case each of the four nodes represent pages or views that you’d expect to see within the application.
However, if we consider what might happen on a slate/tablet/desktop experience, not all of these nodes has to be a dedicated page. For example, the Login might be a popup/modal style dialog that appears across the centre of the screen. In fact, with Windows, this is exactly how the Web Authentication Broker appears. There may also be other non-core views that are not represented on here which will features as pages/views on phone but as nested views or modal style dialogs on the larger screen. For example viewing a photo may be a full screen, separate page, experience on phone. On larger devices it may be that this is again a popup/modal style interface.
One thing that can be noted from this diagram is that the Login can be accessed from any of the nodes. Whilst the initial experience will be to navigate to Login from the Home page on first run, at any point there after, if synchronisation fails due to an authentication issue, it’s important that the user is prompted to authenticate immediately to ensure they can continue to operate. This doesn’t need to be a blocking operation as it may be that the user needs to continue to work, despite authentication failing. It is however, important that some rules are in place to ensure the user does update their authentication information (ie enter correct password) within a nominated period for security reasons. After all, there is the scenario where the user no longer works for the organisation in which case their account should both be locked (ie can’t authenticate) and access should be prevented to the application.