Left or right navigation?

[denny]

An entire research paper on whether you should put your navigation links on the left or right of your website (summary: it doesn't matter). Posted here mostly for my own reference, but I thought it might interest a couple of other people.

http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v04/i01/Kalbach/

Comments

[echan.livejournal.com]

Interesting (no, seriously). Back in the day, when Lynx was still somewhat widely used and webpages were still handcoded, you were supposed to always put navigation stuff on the left or on top. The idea, as I recall it, was that if the surfer didn't want to be where they were, the first part of the page told them how to go elsewhere. Made it a lot easier on people using Lynx and screen readers as well. (Websites with frames in Lynx is irritating pain. (And even more off topic, I heard the new version of Lynx has tabs. Insanity! ((Meta:) Ever since learning (the really cool awesomeness that is) Lisp, I write with a lot more ()s.)))

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

It's fairly easy to set your divs up so that a graphical browser would see the navigation stuff on the right, but an inline textmode browser would get it at the top of the page.

I do tend to the theory that your content should be the first thing someone sees, regardless of what browser they're using... the content is the reason they're on the site (hopefully).

[deliberateblank.livejournal.com]

summary: it doesn't matter

...though further research is required to confirm the result.

[kake]

The thing I was wondering was why they didn't discuss the disparity between their results (no significant differences in task completion time) and those of Hofer and Zimmermann (left-hand navigation was twice as fast as any other position).

It's very good to see people actually studying this stuff, though.

[echan.livejournal.com]

The thing I was wondering was why they didn't discuss the disparity between their results (no significant differences in task completion time) and those of Hofer and Zimmermann (left-hand navigation was twice as fast as any other position).

They may have done that with this: "Observations made during the tests [...] suggest that Group 1 (right navigation) initially spent more time reading and scanning the main content on the page than Group 2, accounting for the longer completion times. [...] Overall, Group 1 did not appear to be lost or confused; rather, they were busy scanning the main content area of the page first. [...] After the first two tasks, participants in Group 1 already seemed to have scanned most of the content on the page and apparently did not repeat this behavior. Isolating tasks one and two (Table 3), then, clearly accounts for the differences in the total average times shown in Table 2."

[kake]

Ah, thanks, I missed that; I was looking for it in the discussion, and expecting it to be explicit.