4 Design Patterns That Violate “Back” Button Expectations – 59% of Sites Get It Wrong

BRANK

“How do I get back? Just press ‘Back’. Navigation, this isn’t great to be honest. And now it’s brought me back to the women’s. OK. Don’t like this.”During all our usability studies we’ve observed how users, both novice and expert, rely extensively on the browser “Back” button. Indeed, the “Back” button has long been a staple of web navigation, and users’ often decades-long experience with using it has caused them to develop a very specific mental model of how it should behave.Often this has severe usability implications when many common web design patterns — such as overlays, anchor links, dynamically injected views, hidden content, etc. — have a default technical structure that breaks users’ expectations for how the “Back” button is supposed to work. In fact, our benchmark reveals that 59% of e-commerce sites gets at least one of these 4 user expectations wrong in terms of how they technically support use of the “Back” button.The consequences of breaking the use…