The Back button on web browsers is one of the world’s most heavily used user interface components,yet its behaviour is commonly misunderstood. This paper describes the evaluation of a ‘temporal’alternative to the normal ‘stack-based’ behaviour of Back and Forward. The main difference of thetemporal scheme is that it maintains a complete list of previously visited pages. The evaluationcompares the efficiency of the stack and temporal schemes in an ‘out of the box’ scenario in whichparticipants were asked to use a ‘new’ version of a commercial browser without any explanation of thepresence or absence of new features. This scenario allows us to predict the likely usability impact ifcommercial browsers were released supporting the temporal scheme. The results showed that therelative efficiency of the two schemes differed across different types of navigational task. In particular,the temporal system poorly supported backtracking to parent pages, but performed better for moredistant navigation tasks. The temporal scheme also caused extreme usage patterns, with the subjectseither solving tasks very efficiently or very inefficiently, depending on whether they used the Backmenu. This observation indicates that adaptations of the temporal system that improve the effectivenessof the Back menu may enhance web navigation.
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