Back Broken

9 May 2006

Many a sentence has been written recently about Ajax, and it’s possibility of getting into a big usability mess again – just over we got over the last one.

I am, of course, talking about the back button.

Many moons ago, we used technologies like frames, and made our entire site in one flash file (please ignore the fact that people still do – the difference is that we now know they’re wrong). One of the side effects of using either frames or flash is that it completely brakes the back button – when you navigate around the site you can’t press the back button to go back.

Bad web designer!

Now, with Ajax, we can have exactly the same problem. If you use Ajax (which is essentially just loading page content on demand using javascript) to do your page navigation, yep, you guessed it; the back button breaks.

So don’t do that, ok?

However, there are plenty of things that at the moment you can use the back button for, which you really shouldn’t be able to – these things are perfect for ajax.

For example, say you have a simple content management system, and you click the “delete post” button. On most systems, that’ll load another page to delete the item. Which means you can then hit back, and be presented with a page that just doesn’t make sense (what happens if you press “delete post” again?).

I think with the prevalence of “usability experts”, we may loose sight of the fact that ajax, if used in the right way, can actually massively improve usability; not to mention what it can add to the responsiveness of the UI.

Breaking the back button isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

From: Articles

9 May 2006