YaST/Style Guide/Use cases/Wizard

From openSUSE

What is a Wizard?

A wizard is a dialog, which guides a user through some task, e.g., configuration of a complex network service. The task is divided into small easy-understandable sequences that makes fulfilling the task easy.

Properties of a Wizard

• One dimensional workflow that avoids using pop-ups wherever possible.
• A wizard is divided into several steps.
• The number of the actual step and the total number of steps is shown to the user in the dialog caption.
• On the first step the user should be informed about the purpose of the wizard. What is the expected result, e.g., configured mail server.
• If the wizard contains a large amount of steps (> 3), there should be a summary of the current configuration at the end.
• If the wizard purpose is obvious, unnecessary Welcome and Congratulations pages could be skipped in order to increase efficiency or just make the workflow shorter.
• Help on the left side should no be overcrowded with information but it should clearly describe every single step.

Example of Configuration in Wizard

This example shows a configuration wizard on a running system. There are no steps before the first interactive dialog (step 1) but Read Progress dialog and no steps after the last interactive dialog (step 3) but Write Progress dialog.

• There are Back, Abort, and Next buttons in the first dialog.
• Back button is disabled, there is no other interactive dialog before.

• The second (third, ...) dialog has the same buttons as the first one.
• All buttons are enabled.
• There might be several steps like this one. They would all have the same layout and buttons.

• There is a Finish button instead of Next because this is the last interactive dialog.
• After the Finish button is clicked, configuration gets written.