Usability Roundup – The Back Button | Pathfinder Development | Software Developers

Usability Roundup – The Back Button

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, April 14, 2006 @ 5:20 pm

An oldie but a goodie -- the back button. The bain of designers, developers and usability experts everywhere. Some love it, some hate it. Here is a roundup of some of the best resources on this topic.

Web Navigation - a treasure trove of web usability research by Professor Andy Cockburn of the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, NZ. If you are after some hard data rather than speculation, this is a very good place to start.
Navigation Blindness - Why users ignore navigation and what to do about it.
Flash Back Button Fix - Robert Penner came up with this back button/bookmark fix for flash a while back.
Attack of the Back Button - Some words of warning from John Rhodes. While some of the techniques on this page may be a little worn, the sentiments are not.
dojo.io.bind() Intro - A discussion of the usability issues around Ajax/XHR breaking the back button and a possible solution to the problem within the Dojo toolkit.
Fixing the back button that AJAX broke - An excellent analysis of the problems of the back button, and the related problem of bookmarks, and a lengthy rumination on some possible solutions.
Flash Usability - The flash folks have been wrestling with the back button for a bit longer than the Ajax folks. This is a long article with just a little bit on the back button, but some of their suggestions are quite useful.
Breadcrumb Navigation - With breadcrumbs, users used the back button less frequently, but overall task efficiency was no better.
Exploring User Mental Models of Breadcrumbs in Web Navigation - Another study on bread crumbs as a solution to back button issues.
SmartBack: Supporting Users in Back Navigation - excellent overview of research in navigation and some tested ideas on how to inprove back navigation. Could be very interesting for those implementing their own "undo" functions in Ajax.
Fixing the Back Button and Enabling Bookmarking for AJAX Apps - Mike Stenhouse's crack at fixing this problem.

Topics: Ajax, Rich Interactions, Usability, uxd, Web 2.0

Comments (1)

User Experience Design

Comments: 1 so far

FYI, Echo2 back button issue solved:
http://forum.nextapp.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t2998.html

Comment by Michael Slattery, Monday, September 11, 2006 @ 4:02 pm

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Usability Roundup – The Back Button

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