Go Back to a Safe Place

Examples: Context:  The artifact allows a user to move through spaces (as in Navigable Spaces), or steps (as in Step-by-Step Instructions), or a linear Narrative, or discrete states; the artifact also has one or more checkpoints in that set of spaces.

Problem:  How can the artifact  make navigation easy, convenient, and psychologically safe for the user?

Forces:

Solution:  Provide a way to go back to a checkpoint of the user's choice.  That checkpoint may be a home page, a saved file or state, the logical beginning of a section of narrative or a set of steps.  Ideally, it could be whatever state or space a user chooses to declare as a checkpoint.
 

Resulting Context:   Go Back One Step is a natural adjunct to this pattern, and is often found along with it.  For non-Narrative use, Interaction History is useful too, almost to the point of making Go Back to a Safe Place unnecessary:  it may actually help a "lost" user figure out where they are, for instance, or remind an interrupted user of where they are and what they've done.


Comments to:  jtidwell@alum.mit.edu
Last modified May 17, 1999

Copyright (c) 1999 by Jenifer Tidwell.  All rights reserved.