Redesigning The "Back" Button

TheMatt writes "Nature Science Update is reporting today about research by New Zealand scientists on redesigning how the "Back" button works in your browser. They point to the fact that the current "Back" is more of an "Up" in a stack of pages. They propose a system that records all pages visited. A good summary page of their efforts in web navigation (including a interesting thumbnail-style "Back" menu) can be found on their page."

Comments

WHY?

[Computer!]

The average web browser's "back" feature is almost the only software feature in existence that is universally understood, and works as advertised. If it aint broke...

Re:WHY?

[kawika]

I've seen people expect the back button works that way, and they've been confused when they click Back multiple tims and it doesn't show them all the pages they have been to. However, I don't see that the "new" approach offers that many benefits. The pattern of previous page visits is a tree. Any approach that tries to flatten out a tree is going to surprise (or annoy) someone. Most browsers have a History feature that lets you see where you've been and that works a lot like the proposed Back design.

Re:WHY?

[dan g]

Well I guess you're both overgeneralizing. A quick test shows emacs's undo will redo previous undos, but word will not.

Re:WHY?

[Anonymous Coward]

History is closer to the temporal back button, but it is different in that it records only the last visit to a page.

Go to page a, click on a link to page b, go 'back', click on a link to page c, click on a link to page d.

The "back" stack now contains only page c and page a. The "temporal back" list is a,b,a,c. The "history" contains b,a,c.

I would vote for a back tree with a default path which is defined by the conventional back behaviour. Instead of flat drop down lists, the menus could simply represent the browsing tree. In the above example, the back button would have a drop menu of c and a, with a submenu on a which contains b.

Sorry but,

[llamalicious]

For the labelling:
I prefer to think of my "back" button as working like a paper book. I generally don't flip pages "up" when going to a previous page, so the "back" terminology is friendly to me.

As for the idea:
All I really need the back button to do, for better efficiency, is to skip posted forms, that's all I want. What did I miss in that article that really make their system stand out from stacking? I like my stacks dammit.

Re:Sorry but,

[SanLouBlues]

Then think of their design as a back button for "choose your own adventure books". So if you want to easily flip between having jumped through the dimensional portal and having gone to look for your missing friend you don't have to reread the original forking page.

Not good

[teslatug]

On average, the two systems worked about equally well.

Then what's the point of changing it. It seems to me it would just add more confusion and frustration.

no.. it is "Back"

[trefoil]

when you start a browser.. it begins on your "home page" from there you may jump from site to site.. not necessarily deeper into a website, but more often than not, it is. So to me, the "Back" button has to do more with "Back Tracking" as in taking a hike, and back tracking towards "home".

Sidebar - History in Mozilla

[Bonker]

Is what I think they're looking for.

Lave the back button alone. It does what it's supposed to perfectly well. As long as it's not applied to file-systems or any other PC arcana, it's perfect for the task.

If you want to make something that works for both file-systems or GUI shell browsing and web browsing, design a new tool. Don't overload the existing tools and make them useless for both tasks.

Re:Umm.....

[Quasar1999]

How exactly is that research? It seems to be a pretty trivial piece of code to write. Hell it could be done in Visual Basic in 20 minutes I bet.

Ok, first, ignoring your ignorant claim that it can be done in 20 minutes (it would need at least 2 days of QA testing, not to mention tonnes of time in beta), the research is not regarding the code, its regarding the user experience. I can clone the start menu from Windows XP with relatively little effort, but had I actually had to design the Windows XP start menu from scratch, it would have taken a crap load of research. Sure the code is easy, it's the design, and more importantly the human element that is important. If people don't find the menu intuitive they won't use it. Same goes for this 'new' back functionality. Obviously you are thinking about this from the point of view of a code monkey. If everyone were to think like that, computers would still be hard to use for the masses.

So to answer your question, it is research because they are researching how people use the existing back button, what users want the back button to do, what they actually do with it, and how to change the back button to make the majority of internet users happier with it's functionality.

Re:The article poorly explains things

[stratjakt]

See, here's some programmers clearly overthinking the problem, and not understanding how the stuff is employed in the real world. This is why this stuff is best left to UI designers.

They're viewing the forward/back as popping and pulling off of a stack. Your average nontechie has no grasp of what that means, to them, forward/back is analagous to the path you took to get there.

This morning, I left my home and drove on the highway (1), and half asleep took the wrong exit (2). I went back to (1) and continued to work (3). Later when I reverse my route (by going 'back'), I dont want to go to 2 again. The path I took is (1)-(3), the reverse of that is (3)-(1)

The back/forward analogy is perfect as it is.

What these guys describe is (in english) a previous/next or earlier/later feature, not significantly different from the history menu/bar.

And Up/Down is navigating a fixed tree structure (going Up from slashdot.org/yro yields slashdot.org).

Re:already have it

[AvitarX]

Funny that you look at that as a problem. I think the same thing is a virtue.

If I want this discussion to be in my foward/backwardness I would click the big slashdot in the top left. If I do not I click the back button. I personally want to be able to get to the previous sight I viseted in as few backs possible (usually around 3). It were setup the way you want it could easily be 12 or more after going on slashdot. After every 0 coment I choose to read it will set me back even further. Sometimes I like to read the spicif mods on a post, again more things in my history. If every page in my history was in the back button que that would be very bad.

I fI were to decide I was too lazy to check spelling ect. (I am) and that I would be ashamed to post in such a state (I am not), and therefore aborted this comment, I would have all sorts of crap that was worthless in my back button que (I still will, but at least it will have been somethomething).

More of an 'up' button?

[Zone-MR]

Umm.. no, unless you want to redefine terminology, up would move you up a folder on a web server, like the 'up' feature on konqueror.

The back button system may have its problems, but it is far from incorrectly named.

Re:already have it

[Tackhead]

> Mozilla has an "up, next, previous, first, last, etc" set of buttons that you can use to browse an ordered set of pages. go to the magic cauldron [tuxedo.org] for an example. The html listed below makes this work and (i believe...) is part of the html 4 standard.
>
>[link HREF="magic-cauldron-3.html" REL=next]
> [link HREF="magic-cauldron-1.html" REL=previous]
> [link HREF="magic-cauldron.html#toc2" REL=contents]

Huh? The way I read it, I see:

[link HREF="big_ad_page.html" REL=next]
[link HREF="big_ad_page.html" REL=previous]
[link HREF="big_ad_page.html" REL=contents]

With "big_ad_page.html" being "Hah! You thought disabling Javashit could disable popups and interstitials! Thanks to 'standars', all your back button are belong to us!"

They reinvented HISTORY, back is approp up is not

[aaron_pet]

Ok, the back button is SUPPOSED TO TAKE YOU to the last page you visited... and IT DOES! When you go back, you loose the branch that you were just on though.

I get arround this by spawning a new window.
The tree is copied to a new browser.

If you don't want to do that, Whooptee doo. Just use the HISTORY instead, witch you are ofcourse just implementing in a slightly better way (arguably)

The use of the word UP is innappropirate, becuase it is already used for going up directory levels.

If I click an "up" button,
I expet to go from:
cub.wsu.edu/linux/projects/
to
cub.wsu.ed u/linux/

Up and down were arbitrarily chosen.

Down makes more sence to me as going back in time on a tree...(towards the trunk) and up makes more sence to go forward in the time tree (go out to the branches) would be more appropriate a word, yet... I hate all of these stupid up, down, left for counter clockwize etc.

So, if you want to choose the unchosen arrow direction for your little project, choose down. Do NOT choose up, our you could just use that sundial that IE uses.
-AP

Re:The article poorly explains things

[DunbarTheInept]

That would, to put it politely, suck. I don't want the browser to forget that I was on page 2 at one point. I might want to get back to it again. I assume what you meant isn't that page 2 is GONE from the history, just that it isn't stored in the history multiple times, and is just there the first time. (So if you read pages 3,4,5 from page 2, you normally get a history of 1-2-3-2-4-2-5 and this thing would collapse the redundant 2's so you have instead 1-2-3-4-5. There would still be a '2' in there, but not each time you go back and revisit.)

Personally, I'd hate this. If I want to get back to '2' to see the next link on it (to page 6 perhaps), I want to just go back to the most recent step where I visited '2' in the history, not all the way back to the very first time I visited it ever, which if '2' has a lot of links on it I've been reading through, could be buried quite deep.)

The problem is that in reality you browse through the web as a tree of nested links, but the browser only remembers this as a one-dimensional list, not as a tree. It will always be ugly to try to mash what in the real world is a tree into a data structure that is only a list. The only real fix is a user interface that presents you with your browsing history as a tree rather than as a one-dimensional list. This might be implementable through cascading menus when you click-and-hold the back button rather than just a single list.

So you might see something like this:

1. Page 1
   1. Page 1.1
   2. Page 1.2
2. Page 2
   1. Page 3
   2. Page 4
   3. Page 5

(Imagine the above done as a cascading pulldown menu. Slashdot filtered out my attempts to create ascii-art to show it the right way.)
What these guys propose is worse than what we have now, in my opinion.

Button?

[youBastrd]

I believe they're called mouse gestures.

I imagine people using ten-year old browsing techniques like physically moving the mouse onto a big button as a caveman hitting a target with a big club. It could be just me though.