Pattern 75: Sense of location in workflow
AKA:

Back to Diagram 1 - Getting started Back to Diagram 2 - Usability Back to Diagram 3 - Adding detail Back to Diagram 4 - Workflow/security

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You have ESTABLISHED THE USE CASES (3) and CLASSIFIED YOUR SITE (11) and found that it is a workflow site. You know about the need to provide a SENSE OF LOCATION (15) and a SENSE OF PROGRESS (48).

How do you let a user know where he is during a transaction? How do you indicate the progree he is making towards his goal?

Therefore

Always include Next and Previous buttons that relate to the workflow. Don’t rely on the browser back and forward buttons alone. Use BREADCRUMBS (23). Draw a task map as above, showing where the user is in the process. Test all possible paths through transactions, not just the ones you would like users to follow. Provide confirmations as each transaction succeeds or fails.

Use BREADCRUMBS (23) and remember that CONTENT IS LINKED TO NAVIGATION (76).

Contributors and sources
Richard Dué, Detlef Vollmann

Discussion - forces - known uses

Users need and want to know where they are during a task. This is especially important on workflow sites precisely because doing things in the wrong order can wreak havoc on transactions.

You need to make it clear where the user is in relation to a transaction and be forgiving of errors. What is in the shopping basket? How can I change it? Tidwell’s EDITABLE COLLECTION advises that you show such collections to the user with clear methods for removing and changing items.

Example
A user of tesco.com, a supermarket that decided to sell insurance products, reports the following experience (Computing, 2001/06/28). He looked at the site and found the quoted price attractive. Therefore he decided to buy. When no policy arrived for some time he contacted his credit card company only to find that to payment had been made. Tesco had no record of the transaction. The reason for this was that he had not saved the quotation before moving on to the purchase. As a result the user had been driving illegally for over a week. Two things are wrong here. First, a logically unnecessary step is enforced leading to confusion. Second – and this is a very common experience – the site allowed him to fill in a form without proving help on the workflow. It then threw the result away without telling the user what it had done.

This pattern is related to Tidwell’s INTERACTION HISTORY.

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