Wizard

A wizard takes one long task and serves it a screen at a time, in an order the interface decides. That order is the feature. It suits work that is rare and consequential (creating a cluster, filing a claim, setting up a device), work where later questions depend on earlier answers, and work a person is doing for the first time and will probably never do again. It suits an everyday form very badly: five screens for eight fields is slower than eight fields, and it hides the shape of what is being asked.

The word gets tangled with two others. A step indicator is the row of numbered dots that shows where you are, and it is a part of the wizard rather than the thing itself, which matters because MUI names that indicator Stepper and many teams then call the whole flow a stepper. On this site, stepper is the small plus and minus control for a quantity, so keep the three apart: the wizard is the flow, the indicator is the progress, the stepper is the quantity control.

Most wizards are ruined by the same handful of details. Validate each step as it is left, so nobody discovers on screen four that screen one was wrong. Never lose what was typed: going back has to show the answers as they were, and coming forward again must not re-ask them. Say where the reader is and how much is left, and let them return to a step they have already completed. Finish with a review step that shows every answer and names its action for what it does, so the last button reads “Create workspace” and not “Finish”. And for anything long enough to be interrupted, save progress and let it resume, because a wizard that loses an hour of work is worse than the long form it replaced.

The keyboard and the screen reader need the same care as the layout. Moving to a step should move focus to that step’s heading rather than leaving it on a Next button that has just changed meaning, the step change should be announced, and the Back and Next controls should keep the same position on every step so they can be found without looking. Keep Back a quiet control and Next the prominent one, in that order, and do not disable Next as the way of reporting an error: a control that cannot be pressed cannot explain itself.