[IxDA Discuss] Back button in TAB order

[Jim Drew]

To heck with what everybody else said about where the button itself should be placed.  You wanted the spot in the tab order.

The tab order should run roughly top-left to bottom-right, navigating through one grouped set of controls before moving on to the next, and favoring left-to-right before top-to-bottom.  Standard Western reading order, in other words.

The initial focus should be on the first control that the user is likely to manipulate.  Often this is a text box, but not necessarily; in a view where the likely action is to just click Continue, putting it on that button makes sense.

The Back button should thus be in the logical place in the tab order.  Most likely in your example, that's after all the form fields and before the Continue button.

A tab order which is not logical -- one in which the user cannot predict what control will get focus next and thus how many tab presses are needed to get there -- doesn't help the user.  If the user cannot predict it, he won't use it, and he'll just resort to mouse clicks to do the job.

-- Jim Drew
   Seattle, WA



-----Original Message-----
>From: "Lise L. Hansen" <llh at resultmaker.com>
>
>At the bottom of a form we have a Back button to the left and a Continue
>button to the right.
>
>Where in the TAB order would you say that the Back button naturally
>belongs? 
>
>And do you know of any standards for this?