As regular readers (if there are any) know, I am a big fan of Jakob Nielsen, the Web usability guru. In this week's alert he takes up the fascinating topic of the order of buttons in a dialog box, specifically, should we display OK and then Cancel or Cancel and then OK. His conclusion: "In cases like this, it often doesn't matter what you
do. Either choice has good arguments in its favor, and no choice is
likely to cause usability catastrophes. It might save some users 0.1
seconds if you pick the 'right' choice for certain circumstances, but
it's simply not worth it to conduct sufficiently elaborate research to
find out what that choice is."
I bring this up because it reminds me of the mini-controversy around the order of navigation buttons in a Web survey. Should it be Next and then Previous or Previous and then Next? In our case we did the research and summarized it in a white paper posted on the Mix way back in April of 2006 and soon on the company Web site. We reached pretty much the same conclusion as Nielsen: it doesn't matter. All that matters is that you are consistent. Amen.