This gets to be particularly annoying if you, for instance, check multiple folders.
Of course you can just hold back to quit the app, but that would be an obvious solution, and put designers like this guy out of a job.
As for "no satisfactory solution".. the first thing that comes to mind is having the notification take you to the inbox, but then open the message itself, thereby building the "stack" properly.
But no one wants that flow. If I wanted that flow, I'd buy an iPhone so that I have to completely stop what I'm doing and switch tasks (not that I dare say anything bad about iOS multitasking).
I don't want to get a text, reply to it and then have to relaunch my previous app. A tap of the back button and I'm back to doing whatever I was before I sent the text.
No, but I see no reason that that makes any more sense, the user experience is that they navigate to their browser, surf, drop directly into a message and then go back. Especially since I think you're still thinking about things from an old mindset where users use the homescreen to switch apps. That's fine, but for those of us that want to leverage Android multitasking (and presumably iOS multitasking allows you to jump back into an application via the multitasking pane), it's nice that we have a "history" so to say of our
"session".
Not to mention that this simply wouldn't work in Android. If another application is launched via an Intent... and I press the back button and just return to a new level inside the launched application... I'm going to be peeved. Like, I'm removing the app irritated. I'm actually not sure a developer can even do that, thank god.
Why would you want to insert a new activity in the "back button history" that the user never visited? I was be distraught and am when applications screw with the Activity flow is messed with. The Google Voice app is notorious for stacking activities incorrectly to where it makes the back button useless.
That's why I prefer devs let Android handle it. The default behavior allows users to use their phones like iPhones (in terms of just going home -> app all the time) but also allows us to quickly switch into and back out of quick things like checking an email or replying to a text.
I can assure you I am not thinking of using the homescreen in that way, since I never experienced android when it worked that way.
In the context of checking inboxes, adding an "inbox" activity does make sense, especially if you receive multiple notifications. Although I don't see why there couldn't be a way for the inbox activity to only be added when necessary.
I think that the Action Bar in 3.0 (and 4.0) is supposed to solve this problem. It's basically on top of every screen, and clicking the app's icon on the action bar is supposed to take the user back "one level up" in the screen hierarchy.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 think this is only a problem for people not familiar with Android. Once you get used to it, it's pretty straightforward and intuitive. Fact is, the back button always takes you back to the previous screen you where on, and it works systemwide. So when you opened an email from a notification, you get taken back from wherever you opened that notification. Yes, apps can mess with that behavior, but only bad apps do and those don't get used anyway. iOS navigation stacks work very differently, so this might be confusing for people coming from iOS.
I'm not too familiar with iOS, but may it be that iOS is emphasizing a "silo" view of apps (where you consistently stay within one app until you "escape" to the root), which Android deemphasizes the app in particular, in favor of a more unified feel?
It's not that the behavior is unclear, it's that going back is not always what you want to happen.
Sometimes, you jump directly into an app, but then, you want to do other things inside that app; since the back button normally is used to move up inside an app, it's not always obvious how to do that (and it's sometimes not possible at all).
It actually doesn't move up. It always moves back, just like the back button on the browser. If you want to move "up" that is handled by the developer's UI preferences.
Android doesn't know what the correct "up" activity would even be. Unless they've changed that in 3.0, I have only used the 2.2 and 2.3 sdks.
Possibly true, but users don't expect the back button to move up, they expect it to move back. In the web browser if you click on a link from HN and then hit back you don't expect the browser to direct you to the parent domain, you expect it to return to HN.
Coincidentally, I just finished a rails plugin that does something like this with rails and posted it a few days ago. In this case "back" is determined by a graph of your web app you feed to the plugin. Never managed to get any feedback on it though. However a similar concept has been running on a production site of mine for years with fairly good success; I just finished turning it into a plugin last weekend
23 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 66.6 ms ] threadAs for "no satisfactory solution".. the first thing that comes to mind is having the notification take you to the inbox, but then open the message itself, thereby building the "stack" properly.
I don't want to get a text, reply to it and then have to relaunch my previous app. A tap of the back button and I'm back to doing whatever I was before I sent the text.
browser -> message
to
browser -> inbox -> message
Would suddenly mean that the browser gets killed. Is this really the case?
Not to mention that this simply wouldn't work in Android. If another application is launched via an Intent... and I press the back button and just return to a new level inside the launched application... I'm going to be peeved. Like, I'm removing the app irritated. I'm actually not sure a developer can even do that, thank god.
Why would you want to insert a new activity in the "back button history" that the user never visited? I was be distraught and am when applications screw with the Activity flow is messed with. The Google Voice app is notorious for stacking activities incorrectly to where it makes the back button useless.
That's why I prefer devs let Android handle it. The default behavior allows users to use their phones like iPhones (in terms of just going home -> app all the time) but also allows us to quickly switch into and back out of quick things like checking an email or replying to a text.
In the context of checking inboxes, adding an "inbox" activity does make sense, especially if you receive multiple notifications. Although I don't see why there couldn't be a way for the inbox activity to only be added when necessary.
* note: this is the Gmail app, I'm unfamiliar with the generic email app.
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.
Design for the user, not for your ego.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Sometimes, you jump directly into an app, but then, you want to do other things inside that app; since the back button normally is used to move up inside an app, it's not always obvious how to do that (and it's sometimes not possible at all).
Android doesn't know what the correct "up" activity would even be. Unless they've changed that in 3.0, I have only used the 2.2 and 2.3 sdks.
http://kswope.com/2011/07/10/backstack-rails-plugin/