My Little Battle with Exit Navigation
Alright, folks, let’s chat about “exit navigation.” Sounds like some high-tech term, but really, it’s just about how you let someone leave a screen, a process, or a section of your app or website. You’d think it’s dead simple, like showing someone the door. But boy, oh boy, I’ve waded through some real head-scratchers, and, confession time, even cooked up a few confusing ones myself back in the day before I really got it.
I vividly remember this one gig, we were working on a mobile app. It had this whole multi-step wizard thingy – you know, click, click, click through a bunch of screens to get something done. The main headache wasn’t guiding people into it; it was figuring out a clean way for them to bail if they changed their mind halfway through, especially without making them want to throw their phone across the room or accidentally deleting everything they’d typed so far.
Our first stabs at it? Honestly, they were a bit of a train wreck.
- Our first brilliant idea was, “Let’s just slap a ‘Cancel’ button on every single screen!” Easy peasy, right? Nope. People were totally lost. “Am I cancelling this tiny step? Or the whole darn thing?” It was pure confusion.
- Then someone piped up, “What about the phone’s back button?” Sounded smart. But then you have Android doing its thing, and iOS with its swipey ways. And if they kept hitting back, where do they even end up? The screen before the wizard? The app’s main page? We went round and round on that for what felt like ages.
I swear, I spent hours just staring at flowcharts, scribbling on notepads like a mad scientist, even made some janky paper mockups. I was properly stressing over something that felt like it should be common sense. My project lead at the time, bless their heart, just kept chirping, “Make it intuitive!” Super helpful, that was.
Then, we had a kind of “aha!” moment, or maybe just a “less terrible” idea.
We realized we needed something super obvious, like a big “Exit Setup” or “Save and Leave” button. The words themselves were a big deal. And we had to be crystal clear about what would happen when you actually pressed it.
So, here’s what I ended up cobbling together:
- I stuck a clear ‘X’ icon, you know, the universal “close this thing” symbol, right at the top corner of the entire wizard. That was the “get me outta here NOW” button.
- When someone tapped that ‘X’, we’d pop up a little message. Something like, “Hey, you sure you wanna leave? You’ll lose any unsaved changes.” Short and sweet.
- If they’d actually filled in enough stuff to save, we made sure a “Save & Close” button appeared, usually after they completed a logical chunk of the wizard.
- And that pesky device back button? We tamed it. It would take you back one step inside the wizard. Only if you were on the very first screen of the wizard and hit back, then it would let you leave, again, with a quick “Are you sure?” check.
It wasn’t exactly groundbreaking stuff, but getting that mix to feel right took way more fiddling and head-scratching than I ever expected. We had to pull in a few people who hadn’t been staring at it for weeks to actually try it out. Watching them use it was a real eye-opener. Every little pause or frown they made told us exactly where we still had kinks to iron out.
So, yeah, “exit navigation.” It’s one of those invisible heroes. When it’s done well, you don’t even think about it. But when it’s bad, it’s infuriating. I definitely learned that lesson the hard way. It’s not just about tossing a button onto the screen; it’s about actually putting yourself in the user’s shoes and thinking about what they’re trying to achieve. Sometimes they want to ditch the whole thing, sometimes they just need to step away for a bit. You’ve got to have a plan for both.
