How to design a complex process with 15 steps

Question

I designed a web form using a wizard approach and my product owner liked it. Unfortunately, they now want to use the wizard for everything. Our next screens have over 15 steps and each step is pretty complex in the rules involved, showing and hiding fields, conditional logic and ability to add additional information using buttons. Should i be using a drill down approach and simple web forms and link the pages in a hierarchical navigation pattern or should i use the wizard?

Answer 1

I think we need more information because it sounds like you always have to retrieve the same information from a form. Therefore, how you get that information (and what information you need) is more important than the UI. However, if you need the same information in both cases, a wizard or stepper is obviously a good option since wizards simplify processes for users (hence the word "wizard").

Now, regarding the presentation of the design, it's not so important that you present all possible combinations. As long as you present the components of UI and some examples, everything will be managed at the code level. However, unless someone else is responsible for this part, you'll need to create the entire information architecture.

The image below belongs to a really complex wizard with more than 600 possible screens (I cropped it for space and privacy reasons, of course). As you might imagine, we didn't build 600+ screens. But we'd to create this flow to develop the algorithm for the wizard.