Pauric, I'm not sure I understand your point about the labels. It's hard to get the message across with generic steps! I do think you have slightly misunderstood my general problem though.
I'm trying to say that people can do Task B at any time, and without having to do Task A. They might do Task B on Tuesday, and then later use the products of that task to complete Task A on Friday. For example, let's say Task B is defining everything about some widget. You can store information on a bunch of widgets in advance. Then, at some point in the future, you might want to send information on one of those widgets to a customer. If you hit the "Send Widget to Customer" button, you'll be taken into the Send Widget flow. Great, but if you don't yet have any widgets defined, you'll need to be sent into the "Define Widget" flow before you can finish sending your widget. Am I making sense? Basically, you can start task A (send widget), but you may need to go off into task B (define widget) before you can complete task A. It's not quite as complex as you make it out to be; people don't need to go back and forth at will. People would never go B -> A -> B. They would only ever go A -> B -> A. BUT, sometimes, if they've done B in the past, they might only need to do A. So sometimes the flow is 3 steps long, and other times, if they haven't defined their widget, it might be 7 steps long. We don't know until the first step of A whether there will be 3 or 7 steps (the user tells us whether they want to use an existing widget, or define a new one). I don't see my labels as being any different from the labels on, say, Amazon's progress bar: Sign In, Shipping & Payment, Gift Wrap, Place Order. They let users know where they are in the process. I don't see it as a great cognitive load (understanding my generic labels of A1, B1, B2, etc. is though, I know!). Do you see the labeling issue differently, or am I misunderstanding? Perhaps you could elaborate on that point. Meredith > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:discuss- > [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of pauric > Sent: Friday, November 30, 2007 1:15 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] nested, multi-step progress bars > > Meredith, I have to ask about the value of displaying all the labels > in your example. Obviously you have insight to the application . Do > you feel this detail is critical for a user's understanding of > progress, especially when balanced with the cognitive load this may > induce. > > >From your initial post I took the key design directive 'how to > design progress bars for some nested flows' to translate roughly in > to; 'A method of displaying overall progress when a user has the > ability to change between two work flows' > > -If- completion of the wizards is a requirement and the progress bars > cannot be used as a navigation tool. Is it necessary to have such > detailed labels on the bars?? In my mind, progress bars are > arbitrary, they have no basis in work load or time. > > If, for some reason, a user needs to know they've complete Step A.2 > when they're on B.5 then I think you need something more > sophisticated, the progress bar pattern wont help. > > Either way - fascinating design problem. Thanks for sharing! > > -pauric ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
