Christian Holst

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

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

https://baymard.com/blog/back-button-expectations

The consequences of breaking the user’s expectations of how the browser “Back” button should behave can be dire. During our usability tests, it has been the direct cause of abandonment, with users leaving test sites with much swearing and cursing (even from the calmer test users).

Could have been me, I do leave many sites miss-behaving with back buttons on mobile…

  3. Note from 31 May 2024

    Please, please, please… check on the sites you build that using Command #fn1" id="fnref1">[1] + click #fn2" id="fnref2">[2] always opens links in a new tab, even if you used some JavaScript to build a dumb Web link!

    I see too many sites where Cmd + click opens the link in the current tab, so when browsing a list of links, if I want to open them in new tabs (for example to compare products), I need to use right click and then select the "open link in a new tab" option, for each link.

    Really cumbersome! 😡

    1. Command on a Mac, but I guess Control on Windows and Linux? #fnref1" class="footnote-backref">↩︎

    2. Check the click both with mouses and trackpads! #fnref2" class="footnote-backref">↩︎