Button Placement Confusions - Need perspectives?

Question

I am currently involved in designing an application that has initial 3 steps to drive the rest of the application UI.

We have decided to follow a positions of the CTAs as left to right direction starting with primary. something like this

Here is my case.

This is how the footer looks like with only next option available for the user. Once the input is given to the user, the CTA is enabled.

When I go to the next step, this is how I have designed since the label of buttons mention the direction of the movement too.

In the final step. I want to now keep following the same.

How do I still follow the same rationale of button positions i.e. left to right like I have done in other places? Or should I consider this as an exception?

Any thoughts.

Answer 1

First of all, it's more important to keep consistency within your whole application than with any specific operating system. This is especially true for Windows, since they redesign their UI with every new release.

If your whole application uses the "primary then secondary" button order, then it's important to follow that pattern, unless you want to redesign everything.

So the question becomes:
What design to use for views with "next" and "previous" actions?

A few things to consider:

• For users who read from left to right, it's more intuitive to have "next" button placed after the "previous" button.
• If you already used a similar modal in your application, then it's better to follow the same pattern, unless you want to completely redesign it.
• There is a lot of flexibility when it comes to UI design, as long as your users understand it and are able to use it effectively.

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Unfortunately, I can only think of one possible solution to match your current situation: to introduce a new layout pattern only for views that use "next" and "previous" buttons.

You could move the "previous" button to the bottom-left corner, and place the page number in the center.