> > One of my favourite stats is that 30% of browser activity involves > > using the Back button AND that 30% of users have no idea what the Back > > button is or does. > > Where does that statistic come from? Do you have a citation for that? > The former comes from L. Catledge and J. Pitkow, "Characterizng Browsing Strategies in the World-Wide Web" in Proceedings of the Third International World Wide Web Conference, Darmstadt, Germany (1995). Or so Steve Krug claims on page 58 of the 2nd edition of "Don't Make Me Think", although HE says they said "the Back button accounts for somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of all Web clicks." He could be making it up, of course. So could Catledge and Pitkow.
The latter came from a lecture I attended at the University of Technology, Sydney in 2005. The lecturer did give source details but I didn't write them down, just the claimed statistic. A quick Google (looking for the source of that stat) came up with plenty of anecdotal claims along similar lines (and beyond) but nothing concrete. I don't claim that either statistic is true or representative, just that they are startling enough to jolt me out of the complacency that comes from believing that "people know that" or that anything is "one of the first things people learn about browsers". To quote Krug again, "all Web users are unique, and all Web use is basically idiosyncratic" (p 128, op cit). > > I watched one user testing session last year involving 14 people over > > 5 days. 10 people seemed convinced that pressing Escape would take > > them back one page. When told that the Back button would do that for > > them, 8 of them kept trying to use the Escape key. > > Without being rude, I'm rather skeptical about this, or at > least I think we need to hear more detail. Who were these > people? Had they ever used a browser before? How did they > acquire this belief, when the evidence of their own eyes > contradicted it? Well, that's the point, isn't it? It IS shocking, and you can be as skeptical as you like. Doesn't change what a group of people in a room at Parramatta in June 2006 did, though. The dominant answer when asked about this behaviour amounted to "escape = undo". There seemed to be a mix of keyboard-dominant users (which might go some way to explaining the emphasis on the Escape key) and mouse users (some of whom also pressed the Escape key). They couldn't see what each other was doing. They weren't selected for browsing ability, and seemed to me to be a fair mix of experience and inexperience. We used IE only (no-one raised this an an issue). I haven't seen this repeated in the eight other user testing sessions I've been involved with, but I no way discount the value of having seen this happen. You can, if you like. As to how people acquire a belief when the evidence of their own eyes contradict it, go and ask them, John. I suggest you leave your skepticism at the door. Without being rude, you might learn something about your own users. Observational testing should be required practice for anyone building websites, I would have thought, especially to explore the practical applications of implementing standards (which for the record I am keen on but a long way from achieving). Ricky ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
