“Previous” is the past, “Next” is what happened after

The Santander website seems to be confused what time is.

So, what is “time”? Oxford dictionary defines it as:

The indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.

But we know that already. We also know that things that happened previous to now happened in the past, right? And things that happened next were things that happened closer to now.

Someone tell that to Santander!

If you don’t know, Santander is a bank where I have an online account. And it seems every time I log in I find new horrible usability problems that just frustrate me. It’s quite easy to pick on bank websites for poor usability of course because every site I’ve used are rife with terrible usability problems. But today I’ll just pick on one small problem!

I was navigating the previous transactions where I saw this at the bottom of the page:

previous next buttons on Santander website

Standard pagination controls, we’ve seen them on a million websites, right? But in this case, they don’t make any sense.

The first screen of transactions are the most current, and to navigate to the previous transactions you have to press “Next”.

Wait a minute, that’s not right!

So I’m seeing older transactions, transactions that happened previous to the ones I’m looking at, and the word I have to click is one that actually means the opposite?!

So now I’m looking at transactions that happened a while ago, they’re actually from last month, and to go back to see the ones that happened after those, the ones that happened next, I have to press “Previous”!

As if this wasn’t weird enough, if I press “Next” a few times, I get an option to press “First” which doesn’t show me the first transactions I ever made, it shows me the most recent. Technically the LAST transactions I ever made!

I’ve seen this done of a few websites, and it doesn’t make sense to confuse your users with poor wording.

Sort it out Santander!