[Sigia-l] Left-hand nav

[Jim Kalbach]

Hi all,

we did a quantitative study about 8 years ago on a left-hand versus
right-hand navigation. See the peer-reviewed publication here:
http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/94/93

<http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/94/93>Highlights:
- People did seem to "get" the navigation scheme much in the way Poala
desribes--like a turned steering wheel.
- In general, our participants proved to be ambidextrous in using both
navigation schemes (left or right)
- However, the right hand navigation started performing FASTER than the left
nav towards the end of our 5 tasks. The reason for this is Fitts Law, but
not because right-handed people tend to pull the mouse to the right but
because that's where the scroll bar is. So "scroll > right-nav > scroll >
right-nav" was faster to do than "scroll > left-nav > scroll > left-nav."

Not reported in the above study, we also tested for where users' focus of
attention was. We found more focus on the content with the right nav than
when the navigation was on the left.

Of course, this was just one (very controlled) test and doesn't form a
guideline itself. That is, we didn't conclude navigation is best on the
right. But it is entirely possible to do and not sacrifice overall
usability.

cheers,
Jim


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