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RE: Follow order of widget on screen, or logical order for proced ures?
Subject:RE: Follow order of widget on screen, or logical order for proced ures? From:"Giordano, Connie" <Connie -dot- Giordano -at- FMR -dot- COM> To:"'David Castro'" <thetechwriter -at- yahoo -dot- com>, TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 15 Feb 2000 14:05:19 -0500
My experience has always been, like it or not, do it in the order it
appears. I've even included typos in field labels when the programmers
couldn't be bothered to fix something that simple! Users tend to notice
differences and blame the documentation.
Maybe you can do some sort of introductory explanation, margin note or cross
reference to explain the logical flow?
So, which is better? Put the procedure in the order of widgets on the
screen?
Or put the steps in a logical order, and have the user bouncing around on
the
screen looking for the corresponding widgets? (All of the widgets are right
next to each other, so it's not like the user will need to scroll around
looking for them.)
I've opted for putting steps in a logical order, since we're dealing with
users
who like to have a straightforward explanation. But the QA folks want to
have
the steps match the screen layout.
