Solve360 Discussion Forums

Annoying usability feature

Nov 18, 2009 03:13pm geoster Sentinel 28 posts	I love the design of Solve360, really I do. I love the implementation of CSS and SaaS where everything “lives” within the page. You do this in the application, and you do this on your website. It’s pretty slick how divs can appear and hide at a moments notice. However, this poses a huge usability annoyance for users like me. I use the back button ALL the time to return to the previous page. However, if the “page” hasn’t really changed, I go back to the login screen. For example, when I have the Support Forums up as a tab in Solve, and I click into a thread, and I want to return to the main listing, I just hit backspace and go back. This works as expected some times. Other times it backs me out of the application. Often I can’t tell if there is any other way to return to the previously viewed “div” at all. On your website, when reading the blog pages, the same thing happens. Can you make it so “back” returns you to the “most recently viewed div” or some such thing? Make the navigation behavior exactly like traditional web browsing. Another side effect of this is when I want to post a link (say tweet one of your blog posts) I can’t. The only link I have is the norada.com site. It’s as if your handler is so efficient and slick that it just doesn’t want to behave like a website anymore, and just be its own beast. Nothing wrong with any of this, but I hope you can see why this can be annoying and unexpected. Please let me know if you need me to elaborate.

Nov 22, 2009 11:29am Engineering SpecialOps Administrator 3952 posts	As you found the website and application UI are more akin to a desktop application than a web page. However, since you access it from within a browser the browser’s standard navigation is an option and the two worlds collide. Even though “Back” is not an established pattern in the desktop world there are many clever things we could do with it. However, it hasn’t caused a stir so we’ve remained focused on adding and refining the feature-set to fully explore the benefits the product’s concept provides. Until then perhaps we should just disable it. I understand your point about opening the Discussion forums withing the application. The Forums are a typical website, perhaps instead of opening the site in a window within Solve we should just open a new browser tab. Most of our website pages have a “Permanent link to this page” in the footer.