The reality of the app is that there is a lot of complexity in the app, but
all the common elements have been drawn into this simplified work-flow.
Other specialist clerks enter the oddball business rules. Some just deal
with exceptions all day, and they have a different and more complex UI to
deal with more complex situations.
The key to a successful app, imho, and paraphrasing someone else, is making
easy things easy, and making difficult things possible. A good UI design
(and really, it's deeper than UI, it's UX) makes the simple path an easy
one to follow and the exceptional path available when needed.
If I'm making a wizard, it works like that--and it's intended for use when
the task doesn't have to be done very often and therefore users aren't
likely to remember how to do it.
I find restricted, single-path-through-the-task interfaces to be annoying.
Not everybody thinks or works most efficiently along the same path. Plus
you never know how close you are to being done with those things, and
sometimes going "back" doesn't work so well if you really need to see the
data you've entered in different steps at the same time--or you get
interrupted and forgot what you did back in Step 3.
I try to organize things logically and certainly I set tab order sanely
(though a suprising number of computer users don't know how to use the tab
key or simply refuse to do so when you tell them it's available -- "Oh, I
like using the mouse.")
In a larger sense I don't think it's always a good idea to hide complexity
from people. They get hooked on the illusion that things really are simple,
and they expect everything to be simple. I am so tired of decision-makers
who can't read a few pages of text to gain a nuanced understanding of an
issue and instead demand five or few bullet points.
When people expect things to be simpler than they are, we should not
struggle and sweat to make them appear that way. We should tell them there
is such a thing as irreducible complexity in the world and sometimes
understanding details is important.
Ken Dibble
www.stic-cil.org
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