Hacker News Reader

Comment by cryodesign | Hacker News Reader

Some good tips and a good reminder not to overload the user with information, especially on mobile.

However, trying to give this pattern a new name feels a bit disingenuous - it comes across as self promotional (even if unintended).

This is a well established pattern already and it's known as a Wizard - guiding users, chunking information, etc -- IBM talked about this back in 2001 [0]

And they wrote a 400 page book about this called Designing Effective Wizards [1]

I see this quite often in our industry, people trying to coin a new name for something when one already exists.

Please don't.

Give credit where credit is due or at least acknowledge people who researched it before.

/rant over

[0] https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/us-wizard/

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Effective-Wizards-IBM-books...

View on HN

They likely don't know of the prior art. In fairness "one thing per page" isn't a very literature searchable topic and many people have trouble finding good search terms to uncover all the relevant prior art. "Wizard" doesn't intuitively scream out "one thing per page".

I have no idea how prominent IBM wizards are in the design literature, but I'm a scientist and I can speak to the challenges of finding relevant literature when all you have is what search terms makes sense to you.

Wizards are quite well known if you're working in software and design.

Here is another book that mentions it (2011) http://designinginterfaces.com/patterns/wizard/

And some other examples of the term being used:

http://patternry.com/p=multiple-page-wizard/

http://ui-patterns.com/patterns/Wizard

https://storify.com/kaniasty/how-to-design-a-wizard

The author worked in the industry for at least 10 years and not coming across this well established pattern seems unlikely, hence why it felt a bit self-promotional.

The "Wizard" idea is pretty old too. Microsoft Works had document "wizards" (complete with little picture of a wizard) in the 90s. "Install Wizards" were also common already then.

Funny to see Jennifer Tidwell's Designing Interfaces mentioned here. It's an excellent resource–not just for its specific content, but also in the problem/pattern system is uses. (and it's an excellent antidote against the common believe that designers just care about making things 'pretty' and have no understanding of data or technology)

> They likely don't know of the prior art.

Anyone who's ever installed software on Windows has seen a wizard in action. I think "wizard" is actually in the titlebar in many of them, since these are often autogenerated.

"Wizard" sounds very Windows 95. It wouldn't surprise me to see someone who knows the history very well still trying to rebrand it - I wouldn't want to try to sell it under that name, either, not least because "wizards" in most consumer OSes have a longstanding reputation of not working all that well. And everything old is new again, etc.

(Actually, I have sold it not under that name! Back in 2011, breaking up a gigantic and incomprehensible triathlon registration form into topic-specific sections, presented one at a time with a next/previous flow and a review at the end before submitting. I didn't call it anything much, since it was a one-off and something of a desperation play, but it went over very well indeed, so that was nice. I sure as hell didn't call it a wizard!)

Because everyone loved to hate on the wizards in the 00's, people reinvented them and just gave them different names. It's still a wizard.

To be fair, they were hated because a bad experience became expected. Many wizards were painful, were unclear about what was happening or about which options could be changed later, either didn't provide a method of moving non-linearly or erased your progress if you did, etc. Not to mention the dark patterns sneakily installing toolbars and whatnot.

I agree both with the parent comment as well as the sibling comment that absolves anyone from wanting to stay unassociated with that word.

Most wizards were just annoying pop-ups which made you click on Next for a few times to get you where you wanted to be.

Thanks for sharing those resources. Will have a read.

ODK Collect has had it for a long time too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com