Start swipeable pages on the last screen?

Question

In my app, the user is viewing data grouped by year. These groups start from the year the user first created some data, and from then on every year up to now (in general the app would be used for three years at a time, so 3-4 pages would be the max here). I want to make these pages swipeable, since the pages would use the same layout, just with different data.

Since the user would usually be interested in the most current data first, I am thinking of having the last page be shown on starting the app up, so they would be required to swipe to the left to view older data. Is this an acceptable approach, or is it generally not advisable to start the user on the last page of your pagination? Also note that the app is only developed in German so there won't be RTL languages.

My thoughts here are that one would assume that older entries are always to the left, so having to swipe right to see older data feels counter-intuitive to me, but so does starting on the last page of a pagination.

Answer 1

I think that it is a perfectly valid idea to start at the end and allow users to swipe through chronologically. The main concern is that the user is unaware that they can swipe to view more data.

Adding some forward and back buttons to a fixed UI element that also displays the date for the currently displayed data would let users discover that there is more data than just the current day available. When used, these buttons could trigger the swipe to give the user a visual clue that the pages can in fact be swiped.

You can see an example of this exact functionality when viewing your timeline by day in the Google Maps app (you need to have enabled location tracking). Like in the Maps timeline, you should consider letting the user manually select a date from a datepicker to navigate directly to the day they wish to view.