I think the answer needs to revolve around a few issues, some of
which I haven't seen mentioned explicitly.
1) Which order tests best (generally, I've seen Next on the right;
Previous on the left test best. I believe it takes advantage of the
mental model of pages of a book, though I've never tested that
explicitly.)
2) Which (if either) behavior do you want to
encourage/prioritize/valorize. Do you want people to go through a
section from this page to the next without ever returning? Do you
expect them to narrow something (say search results) by going back
and forth and homing in on the correct location?
3) What are the chances of a user making an error and needing to go
back to correct the error?
4) What are the consequences to the user if they click the wrong button?
In each of these cases, you need to test and build to accommodate
those possibilities. Does it really matter if everyone but one guy
gets something right if that one guy then accidentally activated an
unrecoverable action? Is it better in such cases if you get more
errors of a low-level type that users *can* recover from? Maybe it's
better to add cognitive load in such cases, so that more thought has
to go into which button to press.
All of which I think takes the original question out of the context
in which it was posed, but I think we need to consider the idea that
the Good is not always the same in every context.
Katie
--
Katie Albers, Senior Director
Web-Based Services
Mary-Margaret Network
Find. Grow. Work. Play.
+1 310 356 7550 (voice)
+1 877 662 3777 x 709
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.mary-margaret.com
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