[tanbog45]

I make sites for non-profits regularly and have been asked to add exit/escape buttons a few times. There more time Ive spent thinking about the problem and researching solutions the more I think they are a bad idea.

1. Lots - if not most - traffic is from mobile these days. Most people already know the fastest way to exit a page on mobile - the home button/action. Adding anything else is just adding confusion. 2. Unless you are going to great lengths - ie pre loading a page and maybe dropping parts of the dom and dealing with evidence in the history - are you actually doing anything much to help the user exit your site? How motivated/skilled a person are you defending against? 3. If your exit button is just a glorified link or redirect what is the point? It will still be in the history and if they have slow internet they could end up just staring at your site while the redirect loads. 4. For some organisations having such buttons is more about "showing" they have it than how useful it actually is to the user. 5. I have tried to push for a page/link to basic internet safety information. Educating visitors would be much better than trying to engineer their personal security day. 6. I've struggled to find good academic/research work on such features. Seems like it would be a good area for a UX researcher but I've not found much actual work.

[hengistbury]

I see these points as reasons why it might not be a good idea, but they don't explain why it is a bad idea.

Other methods for leaving the site still work. Even if the button isn't the best way to leave the site, if it helps in more cases than it hurts then it's a net benefit.

These buttons are essentially panic buttons, and when a person is panicking the big red exit button might end up being the only exit they can find.

[tanbog45]

This is way outside my area of knowledge, but when under stress do humans actually use things like panic buttons? Or do they fall back on week known patterns of behaviour?

My gut tells me that the big red button might not even get noticed.

[hengistbury]

I can't claim any expertise here either...

But I can imagine that people accessing information about domestic abuse might not necessarily have regular access to internet connected devices, they might not know the best ways to act under stress. Maybe they won't notice the big red button, but maybe there is some chance that they will notice it, and therefore some chance it will be beneficial to them in that moment.

[int_19h]

Pressing the home button on mobile in this scenario leaves the app open in the background with the page still opened. Worse yet, both Android and iOS show thumbnails of apps in the switcher, and it's an MRU so the last used app will be the first one you see if you bring up the switcher. And bringing up the app switcher is very likely to be the first action the attacker would do to see what the victim was doing just now.