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WebWord Weblog Posting Posting Date: May 21, 2003 A Comparison Between Left- and Right-justified Site Navigation Menus -- "The hypothesis that the left-hand navigation would perform significantly faster than the right-hand navigation was not supported. Instead, there was no significant difference in completion times between the two test conditions." (Comments: Thanks Ian Lloyd)
Reader Comments...
Geez, no need to go Captain Hook on us. Posted by: on May 21, 2003 09:58 AM
oops sorry. And the funny thing is, I always check I've locked the front door at home at least twice. Posted by: Mac on May 21, 2003 11:14 AM
Curious to know whether the wide range of non-standard web interfaces is somehow broadening the user acceptance (desing wiggle room) of interface design? You can't get away with everything, but maybe the user base is maturing enough to support some well thought out divergence from bare minimum standard. Posted by: on May 21, 2003 11:32 AM
I seem to recall reading an argument in favor of right-hand navigation being that since the scroll bar was on the right, the distance between the navigation and the scroll bar was reduced, leading to less task difficulty (less distance for the mouse to traverse). It would be more relevant, of course when pages need scroll bars. Posted by: Frank on May 21, 2003 11:58 AM
There is a webword item about why scrollbars are on the right which may be relevant. Posted by: Mac on May 21, 2003 12:03 PM
Mac, thanks for the reference to WebWord. One thing I need to do more often is search the WebWord archives to see how current stories are related to old stories. I sort of started doing that by linking to articles I've written and interviews I've conducted. I'll try to expand what I tap into. I think the folks at Slashdot do searches of their archvies...and it seems to work well. Posted by: John S. Rhodes on May 21, 2003 01:06 PM
I don't know if anyone has ever hypothesized it, but ostensibly one could argue that, in spite of the distance the mouse needs to traverse, an advantage to separating the nav (putting it on the left) from the scroll bar would be to limit the likelihood of misclicking a nav button/link when using the scroll bar, due to inadequate dead space between a right hand nav array and a right scroll bar. Posted by: Frank on May 21, 2003 03:42 PM
I haven't read the entire article, but there is clearly another factor that is immediately noticable when looking at the two screenshots: text justification. Clearly, scanning a list of items is MUCH easier when the list is left-justified. In the screenshots, the text for the right-hand navigation IS left justified, while the text for the left-hand navigation IS NOT left justified. This requires the user's eyes to jump back and forth seeking the first character in each row. SO, although the study implies that left-hand navigation MAY or SHOULD BE better, the study is slightly biased towards the right-hand navigation Posted by: anthropocentric on May 21, 2003 03:47 PM
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