Back / Forward buttons and usability

Question

The Back and Forward buttons in a browser or browser-like application navigate temporally (sequence in which user navigated pages), which may not necessarily reflect the logical order of the pages. Are there any studies that looked at how this impacts the user's mental model? Any thoughts on how to improve usability and reduce confusion?

Answer 1

There’re a couple of good lines of research looking to improve the usability of Back. One concerns making Back more like Recently Visited Pages than History:

• Greenberg S & Cockburn A (1999) Getting Back to Back: Alternate Behaviors for a Web Browser’s Back Button. Proceedings of the 5th Annual Human Factors and the Web Conference, Held at NIST, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA, June 3th.

• Cockburn A, McKenzie B, & JasonSmith M (2002) Evaluating a Temporal Behaviour for Web Browsers’ Back and Forward Buttons. The Eleventh International World Wide Web Conference Honolulu, Hawaii, USA 7-11 May.

The other research line concerns making it easier to get to “key” pages in the Back sequence (namely, pages where navigation branches):

• Milic-Frayling N, Jones J, Rodden K, Smyth G, Blackwell A, & Sommerer R (2004) SmartBack: Supporting Users in Back Navigation WWW 2004, May 17-22, 2004, New York, New York, USA.

• Orner D & MacKenzie IS (2006). Histree - A Hierarchical Back Menu. IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2006 – Volume II

• Kaasten S & Greenberg S (2001). Integrating Back, History and Bookmarks in Web Browsers. CHI 2001 • 31 March- 5 April, 379-380.

While one might quibble over the exact designs the researchers tested, the general ideas in both lines of research are overdue for implementation in modern browsers, IMO.

It’s said that users use Back to mean “Undo.” Actually, it's more like they use it to mean "Cancel" (to revert navigation, not data entry), and sometimes they use it to mean “OK.” In any case, it causes problems particularly in rich internet applications. I’ve argued that we need to adopt a standard for Undo separate from Back if we're going to solve these problems. (http://www.zuschlogin.com/?p=41).

Answer 2

There was a pretty extensive 2003 study on the use of breadcrumbs (logical navigation) and whether they increased the usability over back buttons (temporal navigation). That's here.

Here's an article from Inside Firefox about how the back button interacted with tabbed browsing and some UI confusion it caused.

And here's another article about how people sometimes use "Back" to mean "Undo".

Hope this helps you out!