Moving onto next step when a selection is already made on mobile app

Question

Working on a mobile app which prompts the user to select country and then select language during its 1st time load. In this 2 step localisation wizard (select country and select language) the action of selecting each option would take the user to the next step without an extra next or apply button. but there's also a feature prior to this that would use the phones location to pre-select the users country. when this happens the country is already pre selected.

In this case how could the user move onto the next step if their selection has already been made and there's no next button?

Answer 1

Let the user select the country. This will bring consistency to the UI without losing anything at all. If you add next button this will increase a tap which is same as selecting the country from the list.

The biggest advantage you gain from this approach is that you will have consistency in the UI and user will already know from his experience with prior screens what he has to do to move to the next screen.

One more thing. The list of countries will obviously be very large. So in many of the cases the selected row will always be hidden from the user and he will have to scroll down to reach the country, in this case selected country is not of much advantage to the user.

I will always go for consistency, consistency brings intuitiveness in the UX.

Answer 2

Agree with point raised by Krishna, let the user select despite the prior detection of the location.

In addition to that I would add the concept of "highlight" or "focus".

If the a location has been detected, bring that option (e.g. United Kingdom) up in the list, or make sure that the focus of the scrollable list is on that specific country so that the user will not be required to scroll.

That will save a lot of interaction required to find the country that is more likely to be the one ultimately selected by the user.

Answer 3

In this case, what I feel is, let the user feel comfortable while using the app. So as stated by both the friends above, Next button should be placed.

However I would like to suggest small change here. Enable the Next button only after user selects the country. So the scenario will be : List of countries will be shown, user will tap on any one of the country so that the Next button will be visible, user will press Next button and will move forward.

If your app's end users will be novice users, you can show a single liner floating message (I guess it is called as toast notification) stating : Please select country to proceed :

If the end users will be sufficiently technical, no need to show the toast notification.