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The 'Back' Button the Most Clicked Firefox Icon
darthcamaro writes "How many times did you click the 'Back' button in your browser last week? According to a new study from Mozilla, it's likely that you clicked 'Back' a whole lot. 'Across Windows, Mac and Linux 93.1 percent of users clicked the button at least once over the course of a five-day period. In total the study reported that users clicked on the back button 66 times over the course of five days. The next most used button is the 'Reload' button with 73.2 percent usage and 22 clicks on average per user over five days. Other areas of the main window that were heavily used include the Search Bar where users input search queries. The study found that 67.9 percent of users used the Search Bar for an average of nearly 16 clicks per user over the course of five days.'"
I informally studied the habits of websurfers at my websites with Google Analytics. I found that for almost every page, the most clicked link was whatever I put at the top left.
My hypothesis was that our eyes were just drawn to any graphic at the top left, no matter what it was, and so we'd click on it.
I'd be interested to see some behavioral UI studies about this.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Read once in a web usability design book that there are two types of users: The ones who are search oriented and the ones that are navigation oriented. Search oriented users use a search engine instead of the browsers navigation bar and the browsers back and forward buttons instead of the web site navigation and links. Navigation oriented users use the browsers navigation bar and the web sites navigation links.
Of course that's an oversimplification but if that's even remotely true (which I don't know if it is) the high frequency of back button use indicates that there are a lot of search oriented users out there. And if that's the case most web sites are designed poorly or plainly wrong from their usability perspective. What I mean is that in-site navigation is a heavy part of most web sites when it really shouldn't be. Instead web design should promote the use of in-site search and back button use.
Multitouch is amazing. I'd say get a Mac just for that, if I hadn't heard that windows 7 has some gestures, too. Mac has a decent gesture vocabulary, but they really need some way for you to define your own, too, especially as many applications don't support the full vocabulary.
At any rate, I love my "giant" (or as I now refer to it, "the right size") trackpad. The new iMacs should've come with a USB multitouch pad instead of the new mouse.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Do you all just use the 3-button mouse that came with your Dell? Back and forward buttons have been common on mice for the last decade. Why click a toolbar button when you can just use your thumb?
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Likewise...
Except when the entire visible area is an image, in which case there IS no "back" on the context menu, thanks to a moronic decision back when Mozilla was new, and that persists today across the entire Moz-based family.
Seems the lead programmer thought there was too much "clutter" on the context menu, so removed "back" when the pointer was over an image. There was a huge outcry in the MozDev newsgroup, and a vote of 701 to 2 (yes, real numbers) to restore it, but his response was essentially "*I* like it this way, so fuck you. Moz isn't meant for end users anyway." (I witnessed this exchange in the newsgroup myself.)
Someone made a patch to address the deficiency, but it was not widely distributed and seems lost to history. Perhaps someone will see fit to recreate it, for those of us who curse this decision on a daily basis (but not being coders, have no way to fix it).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
If I had mod points, I would have modded you up purely for using the word fuckery. Bravo.
Nor me. I use a 5 button trackball at work (back, left, wheel, right, forward), and my Lenovo laptop has dedicated forward and back buttons. And before that, I installed gesture support (Right click and drag left to go back, drag right to go forward). Seriously, I don't understand how people use the actual button on the top of the screen...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
I use Opera with an extremely minimalist setup. No nav buttons no search bars, just thin unobtrusive tabs and address bar. My mouse has back and forward buttons. I know where my F5 key is. To google I just right-click a word and search that (with google as my default search engine) or, more often, I just type "g [search term]", sans quotes and brackets obviously--in the address bar.
Though Chrome makes it one step easier by making anything that's not a properly formed URL into a search term, I still don't like Chrome compared to Opera....that DNS prefetch is terribly inconsistent.
I get the joke, but the reason I do it: it helps keep my RSI under control.
If I were to use a mouse and keyboard all day at work, and then do the same at home, I'd be in a load of pain after a day or two.
Going left-handed at work and right-handed at home seems to keep it under control. It's also helped my left-hand coordination. I was fairly ambidextrous before, but at this point the only thing I can't do well is write. That's less a matter of handedness and more of practice (I never even try) and writing-direction issue (stabbing paper doesn't work too well, if you write right-handed you drag the tip, not push it)
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I'd like to personally meet the guy that moved the reload button from the tool bar and put it in address field way off to the right of Safari. They also removed it from the customizable buttons so it HAS to be there. That was the day before I started using Firefox as my number one browser.
And why Microsoft decided to make the thumb buttons on their mice act like "back" and "forward" by default
Now if only that could be disabled... I love my big ol' sidewinder, but those huge honking buttons that are so useful when I'm killing things in Cantha turn into a HUGE liability when I'm browsing the web and they tap against the edge of my keyboard. =\
I really hate that...