Implementation of "Previous Lesson" button

[FrancisJTR7]

--#### Description
--I believe there should be an implementation of a "Previous Lesson" button on the lesson button group. As I have gone through this curriculum many times have I needed to go back and revisit previous material but to do so I've had to go through "View Course" and manually find where I needed to go. This to me is a problem because sometimes I'll just need to go back to one lesson. Although it's not the biggest issue in the world, I believe it would offer some a better user flow while bringing no negative effects.

--#### Acceptance Criteria:

--This feature would allow the user to go back to a lesson by simply clicking one button as opposed to browsing through the whole curriculum to do so instead.

1. Log in

2. Visit a lesson page

3. Click the previous lesson button

4. The course will go back to the previous lesson

[CouchofTomato]

@KevinMulhern

Wasn't this discussed recently elsewhere? Was there a consensus on whether we would bring back the button?

[01zulfi]

I'm fully onboard with adding a previous lesson button

[KevinMulhern]

Yeah, we'll be bringing it back. But we still need an easy and accessible way to return to the course. We're going to implement that as part of the refresh. Leave it with me 😄

[jonro2955]

I also fully agree that enhancing lesson navigation by placing certain navigation links on each lesson page will drastically improve usability of the site. But I have a different idea: rather than simply placing a link to the previous lesson on each lesson page, how about we move the page anchor navigation links to the right sidebar and place a similarly styled lesson navigator on the left? This way, we can not only go back one lesson but jump back and forth to any other lessons in that course more quickly and easily.

There may be an issue with readability if there are too many visual elements on the page. If that's the case, then perhaps we can make it a drop-down menu on hover?

If this is something that can be implemented, I'd like to help contribute.

[Memomer]

agree with @jonro2955 and his idea for adding a menu, I have one more idea to optimize the process incase we don't go for the previous button idea which can be implemented easily. So I will re-iterate the issue before I put forth the solution, incase a user wants to go to the previous lesson he has to click on 'view course' button at the bottom of the page to check the course list then scroll down and check the desired lesson tab. Can we just add an functionality to view course button so that it auto-scrolls to that particular sub-section which reduce the scroll time. For example, I am on a lesson from Git-basics sub section, so when i click on view course page auto-scrolls to Git-basics sub section.

Recommending this idea as it is a easy/lazy fix of sorts. Ofcourse, I did love to contribute if we go ahead with this idea. @KevinMulhern

[goldj12s]

It was mentioned in #1639 and #1002, which in both threads looked like it was not a popular option. However, it has been 5 years so this issue should be revisited.

[KevinMulhern]

@Memomer @goldj12s thank you for sharing your thoughts. Making curriculum navigation easier is going to be a focus on our site roadmap this year. As part of that of that, we'll be including a previous button.