Back to top UX discussion

[rasibn]

Observations

When scrolling up to reread something on my phone, this "back to top" button appearing and taking up so much space right in the middle of the screen was very annoying. When a website has a "back to top" button, they are usually placed bottom right and don't have text so they can be as non intrusive as possible.

https://uxpatterns.dev/patterns/navigation/back-to-top

From what I know other popular docs sites don't have this button these days since it interrupts reading. Some examples are:

https://www.mintlify.com/docs/quickstart
https://fumadocs.dev/
https://react.dev/learn
https://svelte.dev/docs/svelte/overview
https://elysiajs.com/at-glance.html
https://rust-book.cs.brown.edu/ch01-01-installation.html

and none of them have this button.

So my question is do we even need this button? For navigating to different section (including to top) we already have a TOC on the top right.

Problem

Approaches

Some possible solutions:

1. If we really need this button as is then we can just move this down instead of right in the middle of the screen to avoid interrupting reading
2. We can remove the text and have this at the right side (standard practice)
3. We can safely remove this since TOC is more than enough. And every browser comes with a native scrollbar.

Willing to help?

Yes.

Priorities

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