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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: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday April 14 2021, @02:48AM
Here, you can use my soapbox, and my megaphone, and my lawn... absolutely hate this "modernization" of what was once perfectly usable software. Gimme back my damn menus. And my BACK button.
Oh, know why the Moz family, when the mouse pointer is over an image, has no BACK option in the context menu? Cuz back in the 1.x era, whichever dev was in charge didn't like "clutter" (that's what he called it), and removed it. There was an uproar in the newsgroup and someone took a vote: 700 for keeping BACK, 2 for removing it (one of which was the aforementioned dev). Dev said "I like it this way so this is how it stays." (In just about those words.)
May seem trivial but enough of these "trivial" changes and it progresses from nuisance to annoying to unusable.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.