In my years of information design, I have learned to take designs with a grain of salt. That is, though you may spend many days working out an elegant flow of pages and processes, users may decide to interact with your site in a very different way.
Take the example of any travel site. Every one of them asks the user to give some details about Where and When they want to go, followed by some kind of “Search” button. They click and off go hundreds of calculations to find just the right price for just the right product. Results are displayed. But then the traveler will invariably want to compare the quotes for going to a different place on a different day. So travel sites always give the user a link to “make a change” and search again. Some sites have four or five of these links to facilitate surgical changes of just the right element for the new set of calculations.
But users, as I’ve observed, hardly ever use these links. They invariably hit their back button and attempt to rerun a new query. One would think this is a simple matter, but it can be very complex.
In many cases Web sites pass data from page-to-page using something called a "POST method." Using the back button reverses things and browsers like to give a “Warning: Page has expired” message (this scares away many users). This is so common that there are forums that devote much time and effort to assisting developers in dealing with, and programming around this scenario.
Also, Web sites make use of nice interstitial pages to read while the “hundreds of calculations” take place. This creates an awkward situation where the back button appears to start the whole search process over again.
When things like this occur – it means bad news for everyone. The user becomes frustrated. The Web site server is taxed unnecessarily. And most likely no one gets what they want.
The lesson here is to never lose site of the goal - satisfying your customer's need. Sometimes this means focusing your efforts in places you never expected. Sometimes you end up having to become an expert on "POST" and "GET" methods in order to design something that will satisfy the majority of users.
All because of a basic “back."
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