UX Patterns For Enterprise Applications – Milestones
Workflows are a core piece of enterprise apps, and most work follows a process either structured or unstructured. The process is implemented either by code or some visual drag and drop tool. In both cases, a user of the application cannot understand the implementation details of the process (nor they should), so they cannot easily tell where are they in the process.
A very simple and effective way is to wrap all that complexity in progress bar that provides milestone level information upfront on the screen. For longer processes, these can be high-level milestones that are relevant to users and for smaller processes, major activities can be included. Following two figures show how a milestone progress bar might look.
If more milestone information is required to be displayed to the users then following design can be used.
Whichever design you choose, the idea is to clearly show all the milestones that a user needs to complete, and where they are right now in the process.
Want to learn more about UX Patterns? Download your copy of "UX Patterns for Enterprise Applications" here.
