UX Design Question: Should a multi step wizard save the form contents when the user clicks 'go back'

Posted by Ashwin Prabhu on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Ashwin Prabhu
Published on 2010-06-02T11:31:55Z Indexed on 2010/06/02 11:33 UTC
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best-practices

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user-interface

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web-design

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UX

I am developing a web application that collects data over multiple steps through a wizard. Steps are generally not interdependent, in that data input at each step has little or no effect on the consequent steps. However each step may have a set of validations which determine whether the user can progress to the next step by clicking 'continue'

What should be the behavior when the user clicks previous?

a> Quickly move to the previous page, thus losing all the unsaved data in the form. Prompting the user with a warning is an option, but it can become irritating quite soon.

b> Move to the previous page saving all the data in the current step - without triggering validations, so that when the user comes back she sees the form in the same state that she left it in.

c> any other behaviour

All opinions are welcome :)

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