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.

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: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).

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!"

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.