User interaction – do we need less clicks ?
In my current project, a information system for medical care (see www.joiningtracks.org) we designed with minimalization of mouse clicks as a goal. The result provides us with a very compact screen that contains all the ‘choices’ available to the end user in a single view.
Another approach to the same functionality may be the ‘touch screen’ approach. When you are able to navigate the whole ‘touch screen like’, the screen(s) are easy to use and understand.
With that in mind, you could redesign this page above to the following sequence of pages:
First: There is the option to quickly select a known party
Second: When isn’t already known, it is possible to find another party
After entering data, it shows the matches and an option to create a new party. This forces the users to first look for an existing party.
When the party is not found (and selected), you are able to create a new one.
This approach takes 4 clicks to actually create a new party. The first, more compact, approach takes 2 clicks. Which one is better ?