links for 23 April 2006
Shouldn’t take you long to guess what I’ve been stewing on today (thanks John!) 
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Research shows that users click on topics in the right margin with much more efficiency than topics placed on the left because they are located much closer to the scroll bar. This allows users to quickly move the pointer between the scroll bar and the ind
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Gerry Gaffny believes that navigation should be located either top or left (not right) in order to remain consistent with the majority of sites online.
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Razorfish Germany found that RHS navigation was quickly learnable, efficient and enjoyable. They used it as a point of difference and to support ‘innovation’ in branding. Includes excellent lit. review
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…. As for left and right navigation, it appears that right placement — which is unusual among news websites — is a viable option. The performance of right-nav placement was very similar to left.
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… There are no rules stating where the navigation should appear on the page (but goes on to say most users expect to find at top or left)
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… Above all, be consistent! However you decide to organize your navigation, don’t make visitors re-learn it from one section of the site to the next.
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Jared says: having tested a ton of users on bundles of sites, we’ve learned over the years that navigation placement doesn’t matter one whit. Put the navigation practically anywhere on the page and users will find it when they need it.
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opens with a great definition of usability, possible a checklist for deciding whether or not a navigation/design etc. is usable or not.
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… although in theory the nav bar would be better on the right, in practice the left was (already in 1999!) conventional for web pages. (also notes that for blogs, a RHS nav is quite conventional)
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If we were starting from scratch, we might improve the usability of a site by 1% or so by having a navigation rail on the right rather than on the left. But deviating from the standard would almost certainly impose a much bigger cost in terms of confusion
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contains two real gems: ‘Web is like an anthill built by ants on LSD’, and ‘Jakob’s Law of the Internet User Experience: users spend most of their time on other websites.’
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jess mcmullin reviewed the Razorfish RHS nav paper and backs LHS nav (interesting comments ensue)
2 Comments
John S. Rhodes on April 25th, 2006
You’ll be happy to know that I used this page today as a reference point for my customers. Thank you for putting this together. Useful!
WebWord » Blog Archive » Left or Right Navigation? on April 24th, 2006
[...] Conclusions: (1) Top left is probably best although the research seems to indicate that it doesn’t really matter. (2) Consistency from page to page is a good thing. [...]