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Developer Tim Bray, of XML fame, has written an ode to The Sacred "Back" Button.
Younger readers will find it hard to conceive of a time in which every application screen didn't have a way to "Go Back". This universal affordance was there, a new thing, in the first Web browser that anyone saw, and pretty soon after that, more or less everything had it. It's a crucial part of the user experience and, unfortunately, a lot of popular software is doing it imperfectly. Let's demand perfection.
Why it matters · Nobody anywhere is smart enough to build an application that won't, in some situations, confuse its users. The Back option removes fear and makes people more willing to explore features, because they know they can always back out. It was one of the reasons why the nascent browsers were so much better than the Visual Basic, X11, and character-based interface dinosaurs that then stomped the earth.
Thus I was delighted, at the advent of Android, that the early phones had physical "back" buttons.
[...] Nowadays Android phones don't have the button, but do offer a universal "Back" gesture and, as an Android developer, you don't have to do anything special to get sane, user-friendly behavior. I notice that when I use iOS apps, they always provide a back arrow somewhere up in the top left corner; don't know if that costs developers extra work.
[...] People using your software generally have a well-developed expectation of what Back should do at any point in time, and any time you don't meet that expectation you've committed a grievous sin, one should remedy right now.
The undo function has been around since the beginning, though invented and reinvented several times. Some systems got it much later than others, but now its presence is universally expected.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Tuesday April 13 2021, @06:22AM (3 children)
How many websites either don't use the back-button properly, or actively disable it?
Just yesterday, I was on a website where you could click within the page, and the content within the page would be replaced. Intuitively, I expected the back button to take me back to the previous content, but: it took me to the previous page, because everything I had been doing was script-driven. Non-intuitive.
At the other extreme, a shopping site I was on earlier this week, where they had apparently actively replaced the browser history: the back button was nothing but a page-refresh.
So, yes, it's a nice thing. But it's not free, and it still needs to be used properly.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Booga1 on Tuesday April 13 2021, @06:52AM (1 child)
Yeah, I've hit a few sites that disable the back button like that. Sometimes pressing back twice rapidly works. Otherwise it's time to "click and hold" on the back button to see if I can find the page I want to go back to is reachable or not.
Sometimes I swear the people designing the sites don't ever actually use the site. If they did, they'd see how frustrating their own sites are.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 13 2021, @08:56AM
Hmm, most of the time I think it plays out more like this:
boss: "Jones, you DO like your paycheck, and you DO want that 2% raise. So now add this fuckery to the code..."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by shortscreen on Tuesday April 13 2021, @12:50PM
My beef is with websites that force the page to reload when going back. I expect not to have to wait for a page that I've already seen five seconds ago to load again. As a result of this nuisance, my current practice regarding pages I might want to return to is to always open links in a new tab so that the first page remains open in its own tab.