In general, users prefer the “action” items on a Web page to follow some sort of understandable flow — I’ll propose a linear flow moving down and right. By action items, I mean buttons or links where I can do stuff — submit a form, click to a subtopic, etc. And as noted elsewhere, users don’t really view Web pages in an organized fashion — their eyes jump to action items.
I was submitting a multi-page Web form recently, and the organization of action buttons was:
I kept clicking the “Cancel” button, despite its being clearly labeled, because of the assumption that the rightmost button would be send me to the next screen. In short, I wasn’t reading the text — subconscious assumptions based on my expectations caused all sorts of problems. I’m not the only one: in tests with users for different applications, I’ve seen this trend.
Now, never mind (for now) that many users don’t know the difference between Cancel and Reset in this context. If all three buttons needed to stay, I’d make the order:
Or, in other words:
Some good testing is needed here to verify that (American) users expect a left-to-right and top-to-bottom flow, but I’d expect the premise to be borne out.
Related problem: This same multi-page form rearranged the button layout at least once, so just when I’d gotten used to click the left button to go forward, it became the middle one. Ugh. Please.
