[thelist] Do I need a back link?

Luther, Ron Ron.Luther at hp.com
Wed Nov 20 08:47:01 CST 2002


Hi Aardie,


I agree.  ... However, IIRC the original poster was talking about
a report or a set of reports sitting on an Intranet. That's a little
different situation.

Under those conditions I don't think it would be proper to use a
"Back" link because it doesn't really have a use in context.
(There's no 'company need' for me to give a user a link to get back
to Amazon or evolt from within an internal company report.)  ;-)

Some of the things that _could_ be done would include:

* Putting a "Main Menu of Available Reports" link on a report
results page to let the user get back to a menu to select a different
report.

* Putting a "Rerun this Report" or "Back to the User Controls" link
on a report results page to take the users back to the input selection
screen to rerun the report they were already using.  (My understanding
was that this is what the original poster was asking about and I think
it can be a very good idea for some reports. Especially ones with
multiple pages. Sometimes you can even use breadcrumb 'back to page 1',
'previous page', 'next page', 'go to last page' links within reports
where that makes sense.)  Some other reports have multiple 'views'
where you may want to place links in each view to take the user to
any other view of the same information.  While you want some consistency
in your 'look and feel' across all your reports, each is built for a
specific task and therefore may need different linking depending on how
the users will work with it.

* Putting the report controls in a top frame and the report results
in a bottom frame so they are always available.  {While I'm not a big
fan of frames I do think this can be an appropriate use.}


Just some ideas for a reporting environment,


RonL.


-----Original Message-----
From: aardvark [mailto:roselli at earthlink.net]

i would like to take this opportunity to note that if the "Back" link
does not function *exactly* like the back button of the browser, you
may actually be creating a usability nightmare...




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