If full navigation is provided for every page of a simple site, should there be a back button among its options?
Example Scenario: A mobile website has 4 child pages, all accessible via navigation on the home page:
- Login
- Contact Us
- Store Locator
- Jelly-Of-The-Month
Inside any of these 4 inner pages, a navigation bar is provided that has links to each of the 4 inner pages as well as the logo which returns the user to the homepage. The navigation bar is consist across all inner pages.
In this scenario, should the navigation bar also include a "back" button as the first/left element even though full navigation is always available?
Answer
I'm gonna have to say my answer is a big "no" to this. Check out the images at the top of this post showing a bunch of browser chrome/ device images: http://24ways.org/2011/raising-the-bar-on-mobile
Notice anything? They ALL have a back button - either hardware or software. Back on the web is a familiar action on the web - users know how to do it and expect it to work properly. This may be why the back button is also the most used button on desktop browsers (hence FF making it much larger than the forward button).
The second argument I'd make against this is that you don't know the context of how the website will be viewed. On iOS many apps (twitter apps are the prominent example that comes to mind) have embedded webviews with chrome of their own with a back button at the top. Stacked back like that gets to be pretty clunky and not finger-friendly, but then you also have the added complexity of two buttons in proximity that do very different things (back to the stream or browser back).
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