Changing the number of steps breaks expectations
Aliases: dynamic wizard steps · flow got longer
What it is
People budget time and materials against the total they saw on entry. A change in step count is that total growing or shrinking mid-flow: a “further documents” step appears halfway, or two steps vanish after a choice. Once the numeric promise is rewritten, every earlier “how long remains” is void. This is not whether completed values can be edited. It is the ruler itself being swapped while in use.
Why it happens
The total is for planning. Seeing four steps, people clear four slots, fetch IDs, ask a family member to sign. Inserting a step adds work outside the plan; a common reaction is to doubt whether earlier filling was wasted, and whether to continue at all. Deleting a step looks like a reward, but if the deleted stage is one they had prepared for, it becomes “I prepared for nothing”. If the deletion is unexplained, they think they missed something and go looking for a screen that does not exist.
Conditional branches are reasonable — a business account needs an extra verification — but presentation decides how much they break. Drawing six steps up front for the longest branch makes most people overestimate. Drawing three for the shortest and inserting later makes most people feel the stakes were raised. The real harm is an unnamed insert near the current step: the bar jumps forward or shrinks back without saying what appeared or vanished. Stable names with only the index reordered hurt less than changing both count and names.
Where it stops holding
When a fork is known from an explicit choice before entry (personal / business), switch the total at that choice, not after the flow has started. When regulation or risk forces extra documents mid-way, the change cannot be avoided; announce the new step as a new task rather than silently lengthening the original bar. A shortening that comes from “we can skip this because we already have it” should be written as the reason for the skip, so the plan feels honoured rather than the ruler broken. Field churn inside a single step should not surface as a change in step count, or the ruler will jitter.
Applying it
- If the total can be fixed at the entrance from a known type, fix it there. When a branching choice happens, redraw the stepper immediately and name the steps that will appear or disappear.
- When a step must be added mid-flow, insert it explicitly (a new name on the bar) plus a line that “this adds one step”; do not only change 3/4 into 3/5.
- Keep skipped steps on the bar as “skipped” for a while, or say why they were skipped, so people do not hunt a missing screen.
- How to check: walk a path that adds a step and a path that removes one. At the frame of the change, ask “how many steps now, what was added or removed”. If the name cannot be produced, the ruler was swapped. Then ask whether they still want to finish; abandonment clustered on unnamed additions means the break came from an unannounced change.