Don't Break the Back Button on Flash Sites

A recent academic study conducted by researchers from the Universities of Hamburg and Hannover found that people don't use their browser's back button as much as they used to, compared to other elements of a website. The back button is still the 3rd-most used Web feature, behind hyperlinks and contextual buttons (buttons that occur within the content of the page). Be careful in how you interpret this new information, though. The back button is still one of the most important parts of the browser.

The study just demonstrates that the way people interact with websites changes as our tools for building rich user experiences become more robust. The back button is as useful as it ever has been, so if you're thinking about breaking it just because it makes it easier for you to build a Flash site, don't.

What makes the back button so special?
The back button is a classic error-recovery tool that is useful for every application. Most of the time, the ways we recover from errors are invisible to us. We just know intuitively that we can recover. When we miscalculate the ease of recovery, we are inconvenienced in some way or another.

Let's look at some common examples of mistakes in our lives and how our recovery can be thwarted by poor usability.

1. When you walk out the door without your keys, you just go back in to get them. If the door locks automatically behind you, you're screwed.
2. When a slip of the tongue insults your spouse, you quickly correct yourself. If your spouse doesn't tell you were offensive, problems ensue.
3. When you print the wrong version document, you open up the correct one and print that instead. If your documents are indistinguishable to the naked eye, you have no way of knowing which is correct and which is outdated, you can cause yourself and your company embarrassment, and you could perhaps lose important business.

The back button works in much the same way. It's one of the reasons the Web is such a low-risk medium. The easier it appears to be to recover from an error, the less risk a person will perceive when confronting a task.

If the back button doesn't work on your site the way 99% of the people on the Web have learned the back button is supposed to behave, users are forced to relearn a special interface rule for your site, which increases perceived risk and decreases adoption.

The back button naturally works well for websites built in HTML sites, but to keep them working the way they're supposed to in Flash, it requires extra effort.

Some Bad Examples
If not done properly, browsers will see the Flash site as a single page, and no matter how deep you are within the site, clicking the back button will take you off the site entirely, forcing you to find your way back to where you were (or to give up and spend your time elsewhere).

(Dig a little bit into this site or this site, and hit the back button to see what I mean.)

See aceofcakestv.com for a particularly egregious example. This site is so hard to navigate that it requires special instructions just to inform people how to use it.

I take no pleasure in pointing out that 2 of the 3 bad examples of back-button breakage listed here are actually agency sites. For more information on this problem, check out this classic piece on Web Ink Now.

Not wanting to go through the process of ensuring the back button functions the way people are accustomed to, rather than risk losing a visitor, many times Flash developers will simply prevent anyone from using the back button through meta refreshes or otherwise controlling the way they point you to the site. This makes the back button inactive.

Those responsible for making such decisions only think they're trapping a user on a site, but the truth is anyone can get out of any site at any time by clicking the close button.

The chances of losing a visitor in frustration increase exponentially the more you annoy them.

Some Good Examples
One thing I've learned over the years is that it's easier to tell people what they ought to do than it is to actually do it. No one gets it 100% right, which is why any company website should be seen as a continuously evolving project -- it is never quite done.

Here are some sites that make noble attempts to keep the back button working right.

Flash is not evil or inherently bad. But if you're going to use it, make sure you use it correctly. There are tools available (Hat tip to my colleague and Flash developer at Click Here, Shawn Scarsdale, for the information about the tool) to make sure the back button behaves on Flash sites (and Flex and Ajax) the way users have come to expect it to behave on every other type of site. - Cam Beck

Comments

[David Meerman Scott]

Awesome post. You chose some great examples.

[Lewis Green]

Cam,

Without my back button, I'd be in trouble with family and friends all the time.

[Lisa Braithwaite]

Cam, I have no patience for sites with no back buttons. If I can't figure it out in two seconds, I'm done with that site. I'm not dumb, I just don't have the patience or the time to screw around. I also really hate sites done in frames where I can't link to a particular page. Grrrr.