Building a Better Back Button

Justin Macfarlane writes "From Stuff: 'Net surfers use the back button more than any other key. A computer scientist has made the command more useful, writes Will Harvie.'"

Comments

Back button.

[13Echo]

I stopped using my back button when I used to use Opera. Tabbed browsing eliminated my need for a back button (in most cases), and kept my browsing organized. Now, Mozilla and Phoenix support this. It's a great feature. Try using it and you will see that your back button gets only a small fraction of the use that it once had.

Re:Back button.

[Apreche]

I use phoenix, and I use tabbed browsing. But it has definitely not eliminated the need for a back button. I still use it quite often. Given, not as often as I used to, but saying tabs eliminate the need for the back button is silly. I open a link in a new tab, when it makes sense to. I mean, sure you can emulate this new back button by opening everything in a new tab, and never closing them, but that's rather silly. I also use my bookmarks very effectively. According to these guys I am in the minority. I have 7 folders of bookmarks, each with 4 to 10 pages in them. Every day I go down one by one and open the folders in tabs, one at a time, until I've visited all my sites. Saves lots of time.
But, if I'm browsing around I might keep google in one tab, and then when I click a search result, open it in a new tab. But I'm not going to put every page of a 10 page article in a new tab. And if I'm in a forum, I'm not going to open everything in a new tab either. I'll end up having un-updated threads, post windows, and a big mess.
So, I use the back button less, but not that much less. And I use tabbed browsing and bookmarks about as efficiently as you can. Can I get this new better back button as a phoenix plugin?

Re:Back button.

[Jugalator]

I still think it's faster if you happen to own a 5-button mouse. Click, you're back. Click, you go forward. :-)

Hmm... Didn't know about that Right Button + Left Button to get back. Interesting.

If only Opera could offer the same middle-click on a link => open tab in background as in Phoenix. That's a shortcut I'd kill for. :-)

the usability of "back"

[loveandpeace]

This is a well-done study the highlights not only a proposed better use of the back button, but illustrates the hard science and methodology of usability studies. If we plan to break free of the standard keyboard-and-screen interface, studies such as these are the foundation. and what pretty pictures, too!

Loving Snap-back

[Space Coyote]

I personally love the Snap-back feature built into Safari, where, for example, if you do a google search, go to a result page, go several links deep and realize this isn't what you want, you just click the snap-back button and you're right back to your search results. This goes a long way to reducing my dependence on tabbed browsing, and is probably more intuitive for novice websurfers.

It works in a generic way for all websites, too, not just google, which is great.

Re:Loving Snap-back

[Moloch666]

Although this does sound like a nice useful feature. It seems it would still make more sense to open your results in a new window or tab. That way even if you found something you want, but you want to keep on searching it's still there. Then if you decided that it isn't what you were looking for you can close it and continue searching.

Re:Very IE biased, isn't it?

[chris09876]

I agree, tabs are great :-) Definitely the way to go in Mozilla. ...but I could see why they'd make the article IE-biased. Most of the people who use the internet are still using IE. When making generalizations about internet browsing experiences, it only makes sense to use the browser with a big monopoly.

Why not a 'tree' back button?

[slashbofh]

One thing that has always irritated me about the back button is the lack of a 'tree' effect. In the notation of the paper, lets say I did this:

a->b->c->d<=>c<=>b->e

Now with the stand back button, or even their modified results, I tend to see:

[b,a], where what I would like to see is something like:

[b, [c,d] , a]

I like mouse gestures, and I find the only one I really ever use is back, and tabbed browsing does get rid of a lot of the single back, but I'm suprised that this 'tree' view hasn't been investigated/implemented.

Re:Why not a 'tree' back button?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use tabbed browsing to achieve that 'tree' effect.
Whenever I see something worth seeing, but I want to keep record of the current content I open the link in a new tab. It's not exactly what you're asking for (because you cannot determine the branching point), but it works for me. Whenever I get tired of that branch I just close the tab.

BTW, I use Mozilla.

Better back button?

[ScriptGuru]

I think the best innovation in back buttons is by far the 5 button mouse. It makes it so your mouse never has to leave the actual page (to go to a toolbar).

But more importantly, it rationalizes the existance of the pinky.

Similar to Safari Snapback

[goombah99]

The article divides up usage patterns of the back button in to modalities. the main one being jumping back to the portal entry page after burrowing down a thread. this is exactly what the SAFARI snapback does.

Tabs use fewer Windows 9x system resources

[yerricde]

It's just as nice as tabs, but it seems I'm the only one who uses it.

Are you on Windows XP, or do you just run out of Windows 9x's limited "system resources" after about a dozen new windows? Mozilla with 10 tabs open takes fewer "system resources" than IE with 10 windows open.

Smarter History

[Alric]

People are posting ideas about treeview back buttons and different back lists.

I use my History archive for this. I think the history archive could contain a little more "intelligence" in storing previously visited links, and I wish that Mozilla offered a "This Session" history folder that only contained sites/pages visited by the current instance of a browser.

History + configurable 5/7 button mouse + tabbed browsing = a pleasant navigation system.

However, it is good to always question the accepted method of interface design. So, I can't get too down on the article.

what fine academic detachment, from reality

[kraksmoka]

Finally, the improved back remembers pages visited days ago. Explorer and Netscape both delete back memory when the program is closed. Not so with Cockburn's improved version.

oh, it's been improved to be that way? in the early days of the internet, all the questions i ever fielded from the computarded were, "how do i erase where i've been so nobody else knows?".

kids don't want their parents to know. guys definately don't want their women to know. and nobody at all wants their government to know where they've been surfing. does the super back button have an erase the back button feature built in???? that's all anyone really wants anyway.

figures, academia always seems to nail their heads right on all the internet hits.

best back buttons around today are on Mac revs of Mozilla, IE and most mac browsers. CMD + -- = go back . i jones for it on pc's, it rules. course it did wear out the left arrow key on my keyboard after a few years of going back :)

More info isn't always good

[jtheory]

The "tree" idea won't really catch on simply because most of the alternate branches tend to be mistakes, deadends, etc..

I think most of the time when you hit a link, back out, and go somewhere else, it's because you didn't find what you wanted. Obviously this isn't always true, but even if it's only true 90% of the time, all of those stumpy little branches on the tree are just extra, unwanted info that will confuse the user.

I'm curious to see if research would agree with me.... maybe the tree view would be useful if it only saved alternate branches more than 1 link long.

--
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein

Stack-based and UI are the LEAST of the problems.

[dpbsmith]

The authors obsess over UI and user-mental-model issues, which to be sure are real enough. But those are not the biggest issues with the BACK button.

First, an extraordinary number of commercial web sites misbehave when the back button is used, probably due to handling of posted form data, passing along nontransient data as strings in URLS, etc. etc. Try a Google search on the exact phrase "Do not use your browser's back button" for examples of a few thousand sites that at least WARN you of problems. For every one that does, there are many that do not. The problems can be very serious, including double-shipped items, items ordered but never shipped, incorrect charges, etc.

Second, the back button seems to painfully and slowly reload pages over the Net. This may be a function of cache settings, but this is a function that should return to a locally cached state by default. Possible even a cached bitmap... (Yes, I know it would be difficult to get this just right without increasing the amount of function misbehavior).

Annoying things about back

[ThePyro]

The most annoying things about the back button:

1) I just opened a page in a new tab (tabbed browsing rules). I closed the original tab. Crap! I want to get back there! Yet the back button in the new tab has no idea what the previous page was... Is this still a problem in other browsers that support tabbed browsing? (I'm using Mozilla)

2) The redirect problem (mentioned somewhere above). A page redirects me so fast that if I go back then I simply get redirected to where I just was. There's not enough time to go back twice.

3) Ambiguous behavior of back links. Let's say I'm viewing page 5, and I just came from page 6. There's a back link at the bottom. Is this going to tell my browser to go "back" to page 6, or is it going to take me to the page 4 (the page that comes before 5) ? I guess this is more an issue of standardizing the behavior of links named "back"... but it's still obnoxious.

4) More of a "forward" problem, but still a problem... I visit a site. I follow three or four links, decide I don't like them, and go back to where I started. I then follow a different link. Crap! The first set of link WAS where I wanted to go after all! Unfortunately there's no way to get back there without digging through the history - your "forward" history gets overwritten once you go back and then follow a different link. In some cases you might remember which links you clicked on to get there... but not always.

The history tree mentioned above might be decent solution to that problem... or maybe not.