A User's Best Friend

A browser's back button is a user's best friend, and a Webdeveloper's worst enemy. Every save, create, I live in fear of somehow someway a user will find a way to save this more than once. "Save. View. Back. Back. Back, Forward. Save" and somehow there will be two records. I live in fear for important records like payments, and use tokens and other tools to prevent replication; however , when I watch users interact with a system, there is a gravitational force that pulls their mouse into the upper left corner and clicks it repeatedly until there's a visual response.

"Oh there I am, that's where I want to be."

Sometimes there's no going back: hitting a back button will not retract a submitted form; however, users like the back button. It's nice; it's there; it's consistent. And let's be real, that nice "back to search results" link you made one boring Tuesday morning is never going to get clicked.

When viewing a list of results, a user should be able to use the back button - always. They are going to say and think "I didn't find it; let me go back." and click the back button to find their results again.

Lately I see many AJAX calls to view paginated results for a list, and, for example, the url looks like "http://www.website.com/results#pageNumber" The anchor and AJAX call do not work well with one another; the browser get confused and seems to look for it on the page. Who knows, but it makes my results disappear when I hit the back button. Annoying. This should never happen.