We have all experienced this, we’ve closed our laptop, done something else, taken a call for instance and returned to what we were doing to find;
I’ve been taken to the home page without message
I’ve received a session timeout message
You complete an action, but that action fails.
On a mobile this is often worse. You’re making a choice, when a notification occurs, its more important, takes you away, you return, but then it fails.
This is usually as the result of a user story missing from this scenario and a default behaviour being determined by a technology need to recycle memory.
A product developers its our responsibility to direct and improve these user stories, focusing on what happens later and not just in the present.
In the past I’ve been guilty of this, when you have limited time to write a spec you focus on the core functionality, and the exception cases revert to a error behaviour. “a time out event will throw a message”. For customer satisfaction we need to focus on both the primary and the recovery steps.
User enters their search criteria.
> criteria is loaded in the browser cache
Session Timeout
> if the user has a cache object available, ask the user if they would like to resume or start again.
To conclude
With only a little effort, we can handle these scenarios for an improved user experience.