Hi all,
I'm looking for some ideas on how to design progress bars for some nested flows. In the application I'm designing right now, we have two flows for two related tasks, task A and task B. Task A has 3 steps, and Task B has 4 steps. Task B can be done independently, without task A, but MUST be completed before Task A can be completed. The trick is that we allow people to enter the flow for Task A, and then jump out to Task B if they need/wish to. In other words, instead of just doing A1 -> A2 -> A3, some users instead go through the steps: A1 -> B1 -> B2 -> B3 -> B4 -> A2 -> A3. Has anyone ever designed progress bars for something like this before? We can't predict in advance whether or not a user will want to jump out to Task B from Task A, so we can't simply include those steps in our progress bar off the bat. The other solutions I can envision are: a) Dynamically updating the progress bar to include 7 steps after the user can indicated a desire to go to Task B (maybe visually indicating that some are substeps, so as not to overwhelm the user) b) Simply replacing the Task A progress bar with the Task B progress bar until Task B is finished, then going back to the Task A progress bar afterward Phew, I hope I've been clear here. It's hard to explain without a concrete example! I can see shortcomings in both of these solutions so I'm hoping someone might have a suggestion for something else elegant that I've missed... Thanks all, Meredith ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Meredith Noble Information Architect, Usability Matters Inc. 416-598-7770, ext. 6 [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ________________________________________________________________ *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
