How to design a multi-step form for mobile

Question

So I am having a problem designing a usable and clear multi-step form for mobile (iPhone for now). Here are the steps:

Step 1: Search for a restaurant - This field will have fields like name, city, category ... etc.
Step 2: Select restaurant - Restaurants that matches the fields search parameters in Step 1 will be listed here, and user will select one.
Step 3: Select Date/Time and options - At this step the user will have some fields to fill in.
Step 4: Confirmation.

I am not worried about designing the pages themselves but rather about making the user feel that he/she is in certain step that is specified for certain fields. Which is the best way to design navigation buttons to go back and forth? And I wish that the form name which is "Book Restaurant" be apparent throughout the steps.

Answer 1

My suggestion is to find a proper metaphor to use, depending on the purpose of the app (it looks like it is a restaurant reservation app... is it?).

Perhaps a good metaphor in this case (reservation) could be like an agenda/notebook/appointment-book. For instance, you could have buttons at a left or right bar indicating "pages". One page could be the restaurant search, which would handle the query fields and the presentation of restaurant data. Selected restaurants could then be saved in a different page (preferred restaurants, for instance), so the user didn't have to search again in the future. Other pages could present availability per restaurant, showing date and time and the other options you didn't give details about.

In this way, the user would always know where she is based on the active page indicated by the selected button on the left/right bar (like page marks or something similar), and she could easily change pages by selecting those buttons moving freely like when using an agenda.