How many of you are Mac users? Where do you have your Dock -- left,
bottom, right? (I don't ask this of Windows users because I pretty
much never see the Taskbar on the sides, probably due to the vastly
different appearance when it is there rather than at the bottom.)
Why is there a difference (if there is) is how you think website
navigation setup should be and how you personally have your desktop
navigation set up?
Me, I have my Dock on the right. Content -- the docs I'm working on
at the time -- are the important stuff, and navigation to other apps
and the like are secondary, the stuff my vision passes to last. (For
the same reason, my Dock isn't n the bottom. Eats up too much of the
content area!) In parallel, for web sites and such where the user is
going to be dealing with content for an extended period of time, I
prefer navigation to the right; on sites where moving around and
through the site is the chief activity rather than immersing in
content, navigation on the left tends to work better, to my thinking.
Of course, ultimately, it only takes a couple seconds to evaluate
where the navigation is on any decent site and adapt to it. The
practical gain in efficiency of one location over the other isn't that
significant except where the user is going to be immersed for a really
long time -- in an app, not a site -- and in those cases, the user can
usually control some of the location details..
-- JIm
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