In the last release, we did some crazy stuff: we got rid of the Previous button.

Yes, I know, what were we thinking? Part of our design team’s reasoning had to do with clarifying the visual cues in our multi-step forms, which our clients have to use for virtually everything they put together (i.e. Advocacy Action Alerts, Fundraising campaigns, Email campaigns, etc.). There’s so many buttons and links, garish greens and squished dull grays and purples all coagulated together in a row. It wasn’t pretty, nor was it usable, and with some of the bandwidth we had, our team jumped in to do a little cleanup: functionally, usability, and visually as well.

It was fun, and it was a first step to visually refreshing an admin interface that needed it. BUT (where’s the story without this word, right?), there was a lot of pushback. It was good pushback in the sense that we had a whole lot of feedback internal to the company from all sorts of people: developers, product managers, services, training, engineering management, our own usability team, the entire gamut. What was good about all this were the kind of conversations we were able to have:

• What kind of negative (or positive) impact will this have on our clients?
• How are we going to communicate the change to our users?
• Will our users like the change?
• Will the change be appropriate for all the different levels of users, from the novices and “I’m scared of technology” folks all the way to the power users?
• Can we solve the problem another way without impacting so many people?
• What design principles are we abiding by?
• How does this affect accessibility? Visual impairment? Screen readers and tab indexes?
• Does the design decision have hard evidence and numbers supporting it?
• Ultimately, is this the right decision?

You can imagine that all the feedback gave our team an opportunity to think long and hard about the choices we were making, and also to engage in discussion, build consensus and arrive at a solution we could all agree on as the best solution.

On the one hand, why all the hubbub over a Previous button? Or a Next button? But then again, I ran across this discussion on the Interaction Designers forum, and with over 75 comments, it seemed like no one person has a good answer.

Cheers and Kudos to the entire Convio team that was willing to start our own conversations so we could arrive at the best solution for our clients, no matter how small or insignificant the change might seem to be.