Opinions on Dialog Design?
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I had a boss one time who personally disliked wizard type interfaces in software. He disliked them so much that he used to design screens and dialog boxes with every step of a multistep process presented all at once. That's right, every button, every textbox, every checkbox that you might encounter in a multistep process all on screen at the same time. It was extremely difficult to make this work when there were many steps in the particular screen being developed. There were just way too many different states that the screen could be in at any one time to be manageable. Have you ever had a boss who placed unrealistic constraints on your work? And what were some of those constraints?
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
We converted most of our “wizard” UIs to tab paged UIs. Certain tabs only enable for certain conditions, etc. One summary tab for validation errors that navigate to offending tab + field. We also have a few super long forms, but these start with most fields hidden. As you work down the form the relevant lower sections are made visible.
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I had a boss one time who personally disliked wizard type interfaces in software. He disliked them so much that he used to design screens and dialog boxes with every step of a multistep process presented all at once. That's right, every button, every textbox, every checkbox that you might encounter in a multistep process all on screen at the same time. It was extremely difficult to make this work when there were many steps in the particular screen being developed. There were just way too many different states that the screen could be in at any one time to be manageable. Have you ever had a boss who placed unrealistic constraints on your work? And what were some of those constraints?
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
Absolutely everyone thinks they are a UI designer. I once developed a programming language for testing and troubleshooting. (It was even a modest success, with about 1300 users). In my design, decimal numbers were represented as sequences of decimal digits, and hex numbers were a # followed by hex digits 0-9, A-F. The choice was arbitrary, but was a convention used in assemblers and had the advantage of being only one character, unlike the 0x prefix used in C. My boss, who was an electrical engineer, not a programmer, insisted that unadorned series of decimal digits should be hexadecimal, because this was the most likely use in his opinion. I argued the choice was arbitrary and users would adapt to it. I argued that users would be angry when
for i = 1 to 10did sixteen iterations. But he was the manager, and I was nobody, just a masters degree in CS and a few years experience, so I reluctantly implemented his demand. Our first user was IBM. Their number one complaint about the language was how numbers were represented. Duh! I was tasked to "fix it." Of course, adding an # to all numbers made every line longer, and lines had a limit of 255 characters, so the fix wouldn't necessarily work on all programs... Why, oh why do we hire expert language designers and UX experts, and then overrule their expert decisions? -
I had a boss one time who personally disliked wizard type interfaces in software. He disliked them so much that he used to design screens and dialog boxes with every step of a multistep process presented all at once. That's right, every button, every textbox, every checkbox that you might encounter in a multistep process all on screen at the same time. It was extremely difficult to make this work when there were many steps in the particular screen being developed. There were just way too many different states that the screen could be in at any one time to be manageable. Have you ever had a boss who placed unrealistic constraints on your work? And what were some of those constraints?
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Mircea Neacsu wrote:
"oh, let the user decide what he wants. We'll just add check-boxes for the different options."
I've had to do that one far more often than I like. :sigh:
Software Zen:
delete this; -
I had a boss one time who personally disliked wizard type interfaces in software. He disliked them so much that he used to design screens and dialog boxes with every step of a multistep process presented all at once. That's right, every button, every textbox, every checkbox that you might encounter in a multistep process all on screen at the same time. It was extremely difficult to make this work when there were many steps in the particular screen being developed. There were just way too many different states that the screen could be in at any one time to be manageable. Have you ever had a boss who placed unrealistic constraints on your work? And what were some of those constraints?
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
How about 1 screen (to meet the boss's requirement) with a tab sheet across the top. Each tab would be the equivalent of a dialog in the wizard. Disable tabs until the correct state is reached. You could even hide tabs. Problem solved!? I fully admit this stinks like a desktop app from the 1990's, but it does work.
Bond Keep all things as simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere
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I had a boss one time who personally disliked wizard type interfaces in software. He disliked them so much that he used to design screens and dialog boxes with every step of a multistep process presented all at once. That's right, every button, every textbox, every checkbox that you might encounter in a multistep process all on screen at the same time. It was extremely difficult to make this work when there were many steps in the particular screen being developed. There were just way too many different states that the screen could be in at any one time to be manageable. Have you ever had a boss who placed unrealistic constraints on your work? And what were some of those constraints?
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
I would usually ignore suggestions to simplify (I'm a one man team) but this one time, I came back from a long vacation (3 week roadtrip), and I forgot my reasons not to simplify a two button process with one...until I actually tried it. 2 weeks later, a port from R to Python and we have the most mind boggling interface to fill in information, press the red button, and hope the multicore machine finishes in an hour to see if there's any mistakes in the simulations. The other engineers seem happy with it.
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I had a boss one time who personally disliked wizard type interfaces in software. He disliked them so much that he used to design screens and dialog boxes with every step of a multistep process presented all at once. That's right, every button, every textbox, every checkbox that you might encounter in a multistep process all on screen at the same time. It was extremely difficult to make this work when there were many steps in the particular screen being developed. There were just way too many different states that the screen could be in at any one time to be manageable. Have you ever had a boss who placed unrealistic constraints on your work? And what were some of those constraints?
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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I've made plenty of screens like that. I work (and worked) for meat processing factories. A piece of meat comes on a line, which has all sort of properties, like weight, multiple quality marks, color, birth-, slaughter-, and fattening countries... So the worker scans the label and I fill out all of those fields, if possible, but if slaughter country is in a list of countries then you can edit some field, if it goes to (or comes from) some country or even specific customer they have to fill out another property, if the quality is AA then... etc. The worker really needs to see all the information at once because they can't make informed decisions without all the data. I've had a screen where each piece of meat (the individual cuts) was a row in a grid and each row had about 100 columns and the state of each column depended on a combination of sales order, sales order line, loading order, loading order line, production order, production order line, and a plethora of master data (like properties on the specific product, customer, country or packaging). Those were screens with some thousand lines of if-else branches and some people knew all of them (mostly different laws per country and such) x|
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Sander Rossel wrote:
The worker really needs to see all the information at once because they can't make informed decisions without all the data
Hmmm....could be me but I see a difference there.... Yours: "The worker" Original post: "boss" Yours of course is customer and requirements driven.
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Without more context, it is hard to know if your boss was correct or if you were correct in this instance. IMO every project needs to be tailored to its audience and the answer as to if step by step dialog boxes are applicable will vary greatly depending on the audience, the frequency a user will use the UI, and the learning curve just to name a few factors. Who I can say is most often wrong is the person who believes there is always a specific way to do something such as "always create a step by step dialog experience" or "never create a step by step dialog experience". And frequently more junior developers who don't yet have the lay of the land are more likely incorrect by following some "basic rule" someone previously taught them (or they developed) without educating them on the required context for the rule to apply. A good example in this case is the interview step through UI in Turbo Tax. For those of us who fill out a tax form once a year, this is a great interface. Imagine though if you worked at H&R Block and you filled this out every 30 minutes for 8 hours a day. That would be a horrible interface. Same job, same information, different user.
Very good example with Turbo Tax!
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Richard Andrew x64 wrote:
I had a boss one time who personally disliked wizard type interfaces
Were you creating software for your boss or for customers?
For the boss. It was internal line of business applications.
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Sander Rossel wrote:
The worker really needs to see all the information at once because they can't make informed decisions without all the data
Hmmm....could be me but I see a difference there.... Yours: "The worker" Original post: "boss" Yours of course is customer and requirements driven.
My point was more that a form with plenty of fields and states is not an "unrealistic constraint", but a functional reality ;)
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I had a boss one time who personally disliked wizard type interfaces in software. He disliked them so much that he used to design screens and dialog boxes with every step of a multistep process presented all at once. That's right, every button, every textbox, every checkbox that you might encounter in a multistep process all on screen at the same time. It was extremely difficult to make this work when there were many steps in the particular screen being developed. There were just way too many different states that the screen could be in at any one time to be manageable. Have you ever had a boss who placed unrealistic constraints on your work? And what were some of those constraints?
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
Not had a boss require it, but users, yes. There's really a purposeful design difference between wizards and dialogs vs a "form". For me, a form collects a lot of information that is required at once. Typically, only dropdowns and checkboxes are used for changing the displayed information and flow. Really depends on the target, in terms of "expert user" vs general public and desktop, mobile, or web. Wizards are often failures when the user needs to remember what the heck they answered seven dialogs ago. That's both what the answer was and if they clicked on the right thing or not. There's good cases for either and/or both to be used. Sometimes giving the user the TurboTax options of step by step or just fill it out make sense.
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I had a boss one time who personally disliked wizard type interfaces in software. He disliked them so much that he used to design screens and dialog boxes with every step of a multistep process presented all at once. That's right, every button, every textbox, every checkbox that you might encounter in a multistep process all on screen at the same time. It was extremely difficult to make this work when there were many steps in the particular screen being developed. There were just way too many different states that the screen could be in at any one time to be manageable. Have you ever had a boss who placed unrealistic constraints on your work? And what were some of those constraints?
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
I'm the boss, now. We will be switching to cuneiform on clay tablets as soon as the clay arrives.
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I had a boss one time who personally disliked wizard type interfaces in software. He disliked them so much that he used to design screens and dialog boxes with every step of a multistep process presented all at once. That's right, every button, every textbox, every checkbox that you might encounter in a multistep process all on screen at the same time. It was extremely difficult to make this work when there were many steps in the particular screen being developed. There were just way too many different states that the screen could be in at any one time to be manageable. Have you ever had a boss who placed unrealistic constraints on your work? And what were some of those constraints?
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
I am in the opposite boat. I prefer limiting peoples prompting with Wizard Type interfaces. I usually implement them as TABS (where the tabs are all hidden), but the progression is clear to the developer. Personally, I would argue with my boss over such a thing. While Wizard interfaces can be Abused (like anything else), they exist for a reason. For NOVICE users and NON-VISUAL people, more than a HANDFUL of things on the screen is overwhelming. Proven so many times, that Microsoft, et al, changed and leveraged Wizards everywhere. (And the old HELP indexing is an example of a POOR wizard style design. Popping up a wizard with one option. LOL) Anyways, your boss is wrong. UNLESS he can prove that ALL of your USER BASE actually prefers this interface approach. Finally, he should have to prove that it reduces support, and that the support people are on-board with this decision. Then again... Nobody hires me... And then expects me to NOT call them out! It's literally why I end up getting involved... FWIW, I would often drag a receptionist in to a meeting, and have them decide. If the manager/BOSS can actually see the stress it causes someone to process a huge complex screen... And the ease in which they click Next, Next, Next... With the Wizard interface, I can give every SET of options the details/explanation it needs! I can reasonably default the values, or leave them BLANK and DEMAND the user chooses...
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I had a boss one time who personally disliked wizard type interfaces in software. He disliked them so much that he used to design screens and dialog boxes with every step of a multistep process presented all at once. That's right, every button, every textbox, every checkbox that you might encounter in a multistep process all on screen at the same time. It was extremely difficult to make this work when there were many steps in the particular screen being developed. There were just way too many different states that the screen could be in at any one time to be manageable. Have you ever had a boss who placed unrealistic constraints on your work? And what were some of those constraints?
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
Nit UX design but processes. I had a boss who had literally 0 idea that you FIRST define the requirements for a process and AFTERWARDS define the process. He dictated me a process that's somewhere between a fever dream and a friggin' joke and went very personal very quickly when I started explaining, based on the known facts about the product strategy, how exactly this process is a bad idea. This asshole doesn't work here anymore.
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My point was more that a form with plenty of fields and states is not an "unrealistic constraint", but a functional reality ;)
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