The Back Button Dilemma
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The Back Button Dilemma
1–10 of 24 posts
Re: The Back Button Dilemma
#2This gets to be particularly annoying if you, for instance, check multiple folders.
Of course you can just hold back to quit the app, but that would be an obvious solution, and put designers like this guy out of a job.
As for "no satisfactory solution".. the first thing that comes to mind is having the notification take you to the inbox, but then open the message itself, thereby building the "stack" properly.
Re: The Back Button Dilemma
#3I think that the Action Bar in 3.0 (and 4.0) is supposed to solve this problem. It's basically on top of every screen, and clicking the app's icon on the action bar is supposed to take the user back "one level up" in the screen hierarchy.
Re: The Back Button Dilemma
#4This gets to be particularly annoying if you, for instance, check multiple folders. Of course you can just hold back to quit the app, but that would be an obvious solution, and put designers like this guy out of a job. As for "no satisfactory solution".. the first thing that comes to mind is having the notification take you to the inbox, but then open the message itself, thereby building the "stack" properly.
But no one wants that flow. If I wanted that flow, I'd buy an iPhone so that I have to completely stop what I'm doing and switch tasks (not that I dare say anything bad about iOS multitasking).
I don't want to get a text, reply to it and then have to relaunch my previous app. A tap of the back button and I'm back to doing whatever I was before I sent the text.
Re: The Back Button Dilemma
#5This gets to be particularly annoying if you, for instance, check multiple folders. Of course you can just hold back to quit the app, but that would be an obvious solution, and put designers like this guy out of a job. As for "no satisfactory solution".. the first thing that comes to mind is having the notification take you to the inbox, but then open the message itself, thereby building the "stack" properly.
But no one wants that flow. If I wanted that flow, I'd buy an iPhone so that I have to completely stop what I'm doing and switch tasks (not that I dare say anything bad about iOS multitasking). I don't want to get a text, reply to it and then have to relaunch my previous app. A tap of the back button and I'm back to doing whatever I was before I sent the text.
I wasn't aware that going from say,
browser -> message
to
browser -> inbox -> message
Would suddenly mean that the browser gets killed. Is this really the case?
Re: The Back Button Dilemma
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
But no one wants that flow. If I wanted that flow, I'd buy an iPhone so that I have to completely stop what I'm doing and switch tasks (not that I dare say anything bad about iOS multitasking). I don't want to get a text, reply to it and then have to relaunch my previous app. A tap of the back button and I'm back to doing whatever I was before I sent the text.
I wasn't aware that going from say, browser -> message to browser -> inbox -> message Would suddenly mean that the browser gets killed. Is this really the case?
No, but I see no reason that that makes any more sense, the user experience is that they navigate to their browser, surf, drop directly into a message and then go back. Especially since I think you're still thinking about things from an old mindset where users use the homescreen to switch apps. That's fine, but for those of us that want to leverage Android multitasking (and presumably iOS multitasking allows you to jump back into an application via the multitasking pane), it's nice that we have a "history" so to say of our
"session".
Not to mention that this simply wouldn't work in Android. If another application is launched via an Intent... and I press the back button and just return to a new level inside the launched application... I'm going to be peeved. Like, I'm removing the app irritated. I'm actually not sure a developer can even do that, thank god.
Why would you want to insert a new activity in the "back button history" that the user never visited? I was be distraught and am when applications screw with the Activity flow is messed with. The Google Voice app is notorious for stacking activities incorrectly to where it makes the back button useless.
That's why I prefer devs let Android handle it. The default behavior allows users to use their phones like iPhones (in terms of just going home -> app all the time) but also allows us to quickly switch into and back out of quick things like checking an email or replying to a text.
Re: The Back Button Dilemma
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wasn't aware that going from say, browser -> message to browser -> inbox -> message Would suddenly mean that the browser gets killed. Is this really the case?
No, but I see no reason that that makes any more sense, the user experience is that they navigate to their browser, surf, drop directly into a message and then go back. Especially since I think you're still thinking about things from an old mindset where users use the homescreen to switch apps. That's fine, but for those of us that want to leverage Android multitasking (and presumably iOS multitasking allows you to j…
I can assure you I am not thinking of using the homescreen in that way, since I never experienced android when it worked that way.
In the context of checking inboxes, adding an "inbox" activity does make sense, especially if you receive multiple notifications. Although I don't see why there couldn't be a way for the inbox activity to only be added when necessary.
Re: The Back Button Dilemma
#8No. Just... no.
If I go from a notification to the inner workings of an app, hitting back _should_ bring me right back to the view I was when I selected the notification. If that was the home screen, bring me back to the home screen. If I happened to be writing an e-mail and I got an @-reply on Twiiter with a notification, pressing back after reading the tweet should throw me right back to writing the e-mail.
I said it in yesterday's thread and I'll say it again here: the back button IS NOT an up button. Bad applications will attempt to "re-create" their internal stack of intents when you jump directly into a middle intent (like reading a Tweet or an e-mail), which breaks the back button's functionality. The author touched upon this in his post. A good analogy is Twitter's hash-bang urls breaking the back button in your browser. In this scenario Android's native Gmail app does it right: clicking back from a notification does NOT bring you to your inbox: it brings you right back into whatever you were doing.
Lazy app developers will try to shoe-horn "up" functionality into the back button. They're doing it wrong. What's the proper way to do this? The menu button and/or an on-screen UI element. If you're reading an e-mail and hit menu, there's a quick link to jump to your inbox. Other apps choose to use a button of sorts on the header or title area of their application. Android 3.0 and above have standardized this with the top Action Bar.
In short: there is no back button dilemma. There's a bad developer dilemma.
Re: The Back Button Dilemma
#9I think this is only a problem for people not familiar with Android. Once you get used to it, it's pretty straightforward and intuitive. Fact is, the back button always takes you back to the previous screen you where on, and it works systemwide. So when you opened an email from a notification, you get taken back from wherever you opened that notification. Yes, apps can mess with that behavior, but only bad apps do and those don't get used anyway. iOS navigation stacks work very differently, so this might be confusing for people coming from iOS.
Re: The Back Button Dilemma
#10No. Just... no. If I go from a notification to the inner workings of an app, hitting back _should_ bring me right back to the view I was when I selected the notification. If that was the home screen, bring me back to the home screen. If I happened to be writing an e-mail and I got an @-reply on Twiiter with a notification, pressing back after reading the tweet should throw me right back to writing the e-mail. I said…
To add to what you're saying: bad developers are often under the impression that their app is the universe within which user activity happens. This is somewhat understandable, since their app is all that developer think about. But it's important to remember that while adding a button go up might be the optimal thing to do within your app, it is unlikely to be the optimal thing to do overall.
Design for the user, not for your ego.