Medium should consider a floating < back link or button.

Thandeka Mngomezulu
2 min readJan 24, 2020

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The back button is a great “get out of a flow’s dead end” option that browsers provide. Should a UI rely on the back button as the only method to allow a user to get to the previous page or should the UI provide an additional, site-specific button to return to the previous screen?

I was reading Fabian Sebastian’s Medium post the other day, and as I read through, all was interesting. I then went through the responses of the post and noticed that as I clicked through, there was no back button. I had to use the browser back button to go back to the main post.

I felt that that’s not really good experience for me on the Medium website. See the screens attached:

4 screens of the actions I did in order to land on the responses’ content
Medium website’s screen on this specific article

After reading the responses, I realised there’s no back button or link on the 4th screen. I had to use the browser back button. So…The following is suggested to Medium developers (pretty please), a floating button/link:

I added the < back link, in red to make it visible.

My thought

When it comes to the reading an article, should the UI assume a user will use the browser back button or should the website provide a link or button that allows users to “Go back to your results”, leaving the browser back button as an alternative option?

Let me know what you think?

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