While generally I agree with the article, there’s a couple of things I would add, to point out that it is rarely as simple as you would like…
Small things like defaulting the cursor to the first input field on a form can go a long way to making the experience faster and more seamless.
But only do that if you can guarantee that your form will load instantly. When I try to log into my online bank website, I frequently get enough of the page on the screen that I can click in the first field, type in my memorable word, tab to the next field and type in my passcode … except that the page hadn’t finished loading, there was still some background crap going on, so I’m half-way through typing my passcode in and the cursor jumps back to the first field and suddenly I’m typing in the wrong place and it won’t let me log in.
Checkout workflows are another good use case where chunking items into logical groups is a great way to avoid overwhelming the user. …
You want the user to think “Wow that was simple” instead of “Oh dear. This is gonna take a while”.
But by the same token, you need to provide a progress indicator. I’m a pretty patient person, the kind who tries to persevere rather than give up. But on plenty of occasions, I’ve got half-way through filling in a multi-step web form and just got so bored that I have bailed, because the form gave me no indication how far through I was. For all I know, I might have been on the last screen … or I might have been barely a quarter of the way through. If I had known I was nearly at the end, I might have stuck with it.