I must've missed those tests. The most recent one I found was an
exhaustive one that James Kalbach did in the early 2000s. His research
showed no measureable improvement in usability with a right-hand nav,
despite the hypothesis that proximity to the scroll bar and right-
handedness might have.
In addition, my recent analysis to answer exactly this question seemed
to indicate that inverted-L navigation still predominates, enough to
be considered a convention. That doesn't mean we adhere to convention
soley because it's a convention, but I think one could at least
consider inverted-L as a pattern. And Christina's observation about
ads does fit here--there's a learned convention that the right-most
column contains ads that are to be avoided :)
Just my observation,
joe
On Sep 20, 2008, at 4:02 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2008 07:45:27 -0700
From: "Christina Wodtke" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] right hand vertical menus
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Message-ID:
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Every usability study I've seen in last several years showed the
nav menu on
the right performing at least as well as on the left, as long as it
was
designed with strong affordances and, as was mentioned, wasn't
killed by
resizing, and is more ergonomic because of its location near the
scroll bar.
Moreover, the pervasiveness of blogs, who often have right-hand
navigation,
makes it at least as common a convention. I think the left-hand nav
convention died in 2001-ish. In any case, it's not a worry as far
as I can
discern.
One caveat: don't mix ads and navigation; then navigation does take
a hit in
findability and usage.
On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 5:33 AM, Todd Zaki Warfel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>wrote:
We've been working on a number of web-based applications recently
and used
a right-hand navigation/action panel. Some of these past
applications had
the standard horizontal navigation across the header and sub-nav
below that.
Others used a primary navigation across the header and sub-
navigation in the
left rail.
We chose to have the primary 3-5 sections as primary navigation
tabs across
the header. Global actions, which are kind of sub-navigation, but
kind of
not, have been put in the right hand rail. Additionally, status
information
(e.g. the Account Balance $530.00) lives in this right hand panel
as well.
So, we've made it into a global status and actions panel.
We've done some A/B testing with the old applications and the new
redesigned framework and it's been very successful so far. There's
some
initial delay, as is expected since these guys have been using the
old
system for over 5 years. But after that initial delay, the
efficiency has
increased over 20%.
I'd contribute these improvements to a number of things:
1. The overall redesign is organized better, visual spacing
improved,
readability improved.
2. We've surfaced global areas into a common, predictable area.
Something
they had to hunt for under a number of different menus before.
3. The content is first, actions are second in reading left to
right. So,
the content these people need to access in order to complete the
task is
first in the screen, shaving off some time, effort, and cognitive
load.
Cheers!
Todd Zaki Warfel
President, Design Researcher
Messagefirst | Designing Information. Beautifully.
----------------------------------
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Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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