SIGIA-L Mail Archives: Re: SIGIA-L: The Back Button is Evil! (o
Re: SIGIA-L: The Back Button is Evil! (or is it???)
From: Jared M. Spool (jspool_at_uie.com)
Date: Mon Feb 19 2001 - 12:17:39 EST
For the record...
I didn't say that the Back Button is "Evil!" I said that it is the
"Button of Doom." There is a subtle distinction.
Evil implies that pressing the back button is bad in itself. That
isn't true.
However, we call it the Button of Doom because it is a predictor of
bad things. In clickstreams where users pressed the back button, we
see a drop in users successfully accomplishing their goals from
around 40% to just under 18%. If they pressed the back button twice,
their success rate drops to under 2%.
Welcome to the world of correlation science, where things happen
together or they don't, but nothing causes anything.
The Back Button doesn't *cause* these failures. It just shows up
whenever the failures show up. Sorta like Clark Kent always showing
up just after Superman leaves the scene, somehow always just missing
him by mere moments.
So, one then gets to ask "Why?" Is it just coincidence?
I don't believe it is. I believe that this correlation (which we've
seen repeated over and over since we first discovered it 3 years
ago) tells us that something is happening which both 1) causes users
to fail at achieving their goal and 2) press the back button in
response.
I believe that users follow a "scent" trail, looking for their
information. All of our research points us in this direction.
I also believe that, when users lose the trail, they revert to
certain behaviors. One of them is to hit the back button, trying to
pick the trail up again.
Sometimes, designers intentionally entice the user to hit the back
button. For example, you might see a design which is a list of links,
where it is the intention of the designers that if, the first link
the user chooses isn't their desired result, they will hit the back
button and go to the next link. We call this up-and-down motion
through the content "Pogosticking" since it, when mapped out, looks
like a user on a pogo stick, going up and down.
Our data says that once users start to Pogostick, the chances of them
actually finding what they seek are very small. This seems to be
because they choose the link they *think* is most likely to be the
correct one. When that works out to be false, they then choose their
second-most-likely candidate. After failing two or three times this
way, they feel that the remaining categories have such a small chance
of being successful that they don't even bother.
So, the intent of the designers doesn't get realized by the users,
because they lose their confidence by choosing a couple of "bad"
choices.
As I demonstrated in my presentation, there are sites that prevent
this. Look at how http://www.landsend.com displays products. (Go to
Women's pants, for example, and click on any pair.) In the
right-hand margin, you'll see other likely pairs of pants. This is
similar to Amazon's "Customers who've bought this product have also
bought..." list.
In both the Landsend and Amazon cases, we see attempts by the
designers to *prevent* users from needing the back button to look at
other choices, and users are more likely to finally acheive their
goal.
Andrew is correct in stating that these findings are only relevant to
our tests. The odds are great that we haven't tested your site with
your users, so they may or may not apply to you.
The purpose of our research isn't to tell you what to do when
designing a site. It's to help identify what you should be looking
for when users are having problems and how other sites have overcome
those problems. We want you to be as creative as possible in
resolving the issues, as innovation is the only way we're going to
see a dramatic improvement in the usability of web sites.
Again, my offer to send you a copy of my presentation from the ASIS&T
conference is still open. You just need to send me a postal address.
(Overseas is fine -- we'll take care of that -- it just may take a
little while.)
Also, if you are interested in what we know about the scent of
information, we've got a two day course that spends a lot of time on
this (including talking about the specific construction of links, how
page layout influences scent, and how scent can be effectively used
when designing for marketing purposes). The course is called "Web
Sites that Work: Designing with Your Eyes Open" and more information
can be found at http://www.uie.com.
We also have a series of reports that deal with these issues, called
"Designing Information-Rich Web Sites." You can get more information
on the reports at http://www.uiereports.com.
I hope this was helpful.
Jared
- o - o - o -
Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
242 Neck Road
Bradford, MA 01835 USA
(978) 374-8300 fax: (978) 374-9175
jspool_at_uie.com http://www.uie.com
Web Sites That Work: Designing With Your Eyes Open
March 12 & 13 (Cambridge, MA) -- http://www.uie.com
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