The back button is the web users fail-safe, it’s something they can draw comfort from when they’re lost in the depths of a website. I’ve observed many a test where users click the back button five times instead of clicking the ‘home’ link once to return to a site’s front page. They understand and trust completely where the back button is going to take them, or so they think.

Thankfully the practice of deliberately preventing a user from leaving your website by the blocking back button has all but ceased, however with the increase use of AJAX and flash it seems there is more and more opportunity to break the back button ‘accidentally’.

I recently contributed to a discussion on the UX-Exchange about relying on browser for navigation and judging by some of the responses, even the experts are not in total agreement.  The question seems born out of the fact that technology breaks the back button, therefore should we create an alternative within a page.

When navigating a site the user is on a journey, they’re creating a mental path of where they have been, the back button allows them to traverse this mental path and start again if they took a wrong turn. Each turn on this journey is a click of the mouse, be that following a hyper link to another page or clicking a link to refresh a list of search results.

Until user behavior changes and the back button is no longer the third most used feature (behind hyper links and in-page buttons) we should do all we can to avoid breaking the back button, irrespective of the technology we’re using.

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http://wave.webaim.org/

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It was during a google search (other search engine are available!) that I landed on the following page on Lovemoney.com: How to rent out your home.

I was struck by the seventh paragraph, which reads:

“After all, over the long-term, property has proved a good investment. Sitting tight and seeing out this current dip in the market by letting your home could prove very Foolish indeed.”

I have emphasised the word foolish above, as it caused me some confusion. I read this to mean that letting out your home was a bad idea. After all the dictionary definition for foolish is:

1. resulting from or showing a lack of sense; ill-considered; unwise: a foolish action, a foolish speech.
2. lacking forethought or caution.
3. trifling, insignificant, or paltry.

However, this sentence didn’t seem to make sense when read within the meaning of the whole article.

After double checking and re-reading the content it appears that lovemoney.com is actually produced by fool.co.uk, which is a well known web site offering financial/money advice.  It appears that within this context the term ‘Foolish’ actually means a good thing. Fool.co.uk have ‘branded’ the word foolish to mean the opposite of what it actually means!

There are two lessons to be learned from this: Don’t use branding when plain English will do and know where all your content is going to be published. Context in this situation is very important, as much as I wouldn’t have suggested they use this term on fool.co.uk it would probably make more sense than it does on lovemoney.com.

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My focus is mostly Intranets, however I sit next to our Web Team so often hear their grumblings of discontent, therefore I fairly confident what I am about to write translate to the world wide web as well.

We rely on subject experts to create and write content, often these subjects experts are policy officials with little understanding of what makes valuable web content. Most of the time, publishing content on the Intranet (or web) is a box ticking exercise and something done at the last minute. Very rarely do they think about the web when they are formulating and beginning to write their new policy. Often when you tell them about how people want web content and read the web you are treated to a sigh and a roll of the eyes and told to just ‘publish the content’.

Content owners often give the excuse that they’re too busy and hard pressed to worry about accessibility, well structured content and the user goals of people looking at their content. They’re apathetic to the concerns of us webmasters!

The result: a sprawling website of inconsistent, unstructured content which is too long to read and a nightmare to search and navigate. And who gets the blame for said poor website? That’s right, us webmasters.

[End of rant.]

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“Here lies a major irony of the age of mass communication: the more communication people are exposed to, the more they are shutting off and depending on their gut instinct.”

Web users are impatient and ignore banner ads and pointless marketing content. It’s one of the reasons twitter is so popular, Tweets are short and sweet and if you don’t like them you can just ignore them.

How many times have I heard the following excuse for creating a library of a website full of old and no-longer relevant:

“but someone may want to look at it one day! It’s better it’s on our website just in case.”

Wrong!

Every page, every document, every old press release that is put on a website makes finding the 5% of useful content held more difficult.It muddies the search results, it gets in the way of a good Information Architecture.

This is especially true for an Intranet, which is so commonly used as a dumping ground for boring content.  Remember an Intranet has a captured audience, there’s usually no alternative for the user (other than to not use it) if the content can’t be found. You put poor content into the Intranet search engine you’re going to get poor content out.

Recently I attended an UK eInformation Group seminar on ‘making search work’. The speaker said that, in his experience:

“90% of search problems are about the people”

i.e. Not the technology. Either the content is badly structured and managed or the search technology isn’t correctly configured.

Everytime we put content on a website we must ask ourselves, who is this for, who is going to use it?

Gery McGovern has the following rule of thumb for a page of content:

100 words: You’ve lost 25% of your readers
300 words: Youve lost 40%
500 words: You’ve lost 60%
1,000 words: You’ve lost 80%.

Maybe it’s time we applied something similar to the number of pages?

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