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Web pages that try to prevent the user from navigating away, why?
I think we have all at some point encountered a site that does its best to stop users from navigating away. Typically by sabotaging the back button functionality. Does anyone have insight into why this is done? What does the site gain? Is the decision driven by some kind of metric? Not once has this caused me to actually spend more time there, and only fuels a burning hatred of the organization at having lost my web surfing flow.
- tlb 7y agoA/B testing will often recommend it if you optimize for time spent or even for clicks, because at least some people will click randomly until something happens. Short-term A/B testing doesn't measure whether people hate your site afterwards. Be careful what you optimize for.
- WheelsAtLarge 7y agoI'm sure that some sites are willingly breaking the back button function. I've never done it intentionally but I've developed a few sites where the back button failed to get you back to the previous page. In my case, it was a side effect of a designer's feature that required a javascript library of some kind or a programmatic feature. Once you stray away from W3 standards it is very easy to break the back button on a browser. I've never given it much thought but if I was required to make sure the back button worked I could fix it but I've yet to find a customer that cared enough for me to do it. You see the problem a lot on the web since few sites want to only use the browser standards on their site.
- ksaj 7y agoThere is a website from which I make purchases on a monthly basis. I discovered early on that if I hit the back button after putting an item in my shopping cart, instead of pressing their javascript "Continue Shopping..." button at the top of the page, it messes up the session and I end up having to log in again to straighten things out. Thankfully I don't lose the shopping cart contents, but this proves to be a real pita whenever I forget about their buggy session management. That isn't to say that this is the reason some sites disable the back button, or that there aren't nefarious reasons for it being done, but this is one site where I wish they would do it. So, a very small maybe, is that the sites in question are bandaging over bad session management.