Comment by Pewpewarrows | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pewpewarrows | Hacker News Reader

No. 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.

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.

I'm not sure it's even the correct action to do within your app. Most of the time there is going to be more than one way to launch an activity even within an app. So going up can ruin the user experience even within your app.

The only time I see a reason to override the back button is in games. When playing a game you don't want the back button to accidentally bring you back to the main menu screen. Most override the button and either ignore it or bring up a pause menu. In non-game apps overriding it just causes problems.

I've also seen apps override it when they choose to have a lot of different functionality in a single activity. This is poor app design.

This can be taken too far. Imagine clicking on a mailto: link in your browser and being taken to email - while you're there, you read a few emails and end up back at your inbox. You're done, and you're "at the top" of the app. You want to get back to your browser. How do you do that? I've seen an email app that, under these conditions, pressing back makes you go through every single email you already read. In other words, it traces you back through every single Inbox-->Email-->Inbox loop you ever did. Not to mention what happens in the same app when you muck around the settings screen. Be prepared to go visit the settings screen again!

The problem here was that there are two ways to go "back" when reading an email. Press the back button, or clicking an on-screen UI element that took me back to the Inbox. One of them pops an item off the undo stack, and the other pushes one onto it. It's consistent, but frustratingly so.

I realize that I want to have my cake and eat it too, but at some point having an undo stack that is 30+ items deep doesn't really help me all that much.

I suppose it just goes to show that the meaning of Android's back button is way too overloaded (I think WP7 suffers from this across their other buttons as well).

The normal flow for this would be.

Browser -> Email Message -> Inbox -> Email Message <<back>> Inbox -> Email Message <<back>> Inbox <<back>> First Email Message <<back>> Browser

You'd only be 3 back button presses to get to your browser session. Of course it's possible for users to create gigantic stacks of history where you wouldn't want to go all the way through them. If that's the case you can get back to your browser using the Multitasking UI or by going back to your home screen.

I think most users use the back button frequently however. If you do, you're always only a few presses to be back to your original activity.

I agree that back should bring you back.

Not sure about Gmail. First of all, it doesn't behave the way you describe on my Nexus One. It always goes to the home screen when I switch to it, regardless of how I do it.

Second, is this really the best behavior? Or is the behavior you describe the best behavior? If you get a new message notification, and you tap on it, don't you usually want to see the new message?

And lastly, do you propose that applications should always implement "up" explicitly, or only when necessary? Because most of the time, they would just be duplicating functionality that already exists, thanks to the back button. But if you only show it when necessary, you're creating a situation where casual users won't really understand when and why they should use which UI element.

Sounds like a dilemma to me, for the user at least. It doesn’t really matter who is to blame, right?

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