There is a right order, and almost nobody uses it. It is not intuitive, it is just correct.
Start the engine, then walk away
Turn the car on. Set the blower to the windscreen, on hot, on full. Then get out and do everything else.
The heat is not going to clear the glass in the time you have — that is not what it is for. It is warming the inside surface, which softens the bond between the ice and the outside surface, so that in two minutes the ice comes off in sheets rather than in chips. Everything below works better if you do this first, and costs nothing if you do it while you are working anyway.
Brush the loose snow off before you touch the glass
This is the step that matters and the one everybody skips.
Loose snow contains road grit. Grit is quartz, which is harder than glass, and dragging a scraper through it is dragging sandpaper across your windscreen. Almost every “the scraper scratched my windscreen” story is this: the scraper did not scratch anything, it pushed something that did.
Sweep it off with a gloved hand or the flat back of the blade. Then scrape.
Work the corner, not the flat
Hard ice does not want to be pushed, it wants to be broken. Use a corner of the blade at a shallow angle and take short strokes — 15 to 20 cm — pushing away from your body. Once a crack starts, the flat of the blade takes the sheet off in one movement.
Long, hard, full-width strokes feel productive and achieve less. They also flex the handle, which is where a cheap one lets go.
Do the wipers last, and lift them first
Frozen wipers tear. Lift them off the glass before you start scraping, clear the channel underneath, and put them back on dry glass.
If they are already frozen down, do not pull. Warm them with the blower — you started the engine two minutes ago for exactly this — or pour lukewarm water along the blade. Never hot: a 60 °C shock on a −10 °C windscreen is how a stone chip becomes a crack across your field of view.
Ninety seconds
Engine on. Brush the snow. Corner, then flat, working down. Wipers last.
That is the whole method, it works with any scraper, and it is why our warranty is not frightening.