He sure says a lot of strange things.
Readers Aren’t Used to a Left-Side Menu
Yet their eyes go straight for it and it’s been used in web design for over a decade. Like links being underlined (there is no print version of either menus NOR links, so whatever Tim BL came up with 20 years ago seems to be what they say “people are used to”). I mean, could we say links shouldn’t be underlined because you don’t see it in magazines? Magazines are totally different from web pages!
Although the Dan Conaway website (above) has a few usability issues, the use of a horizontal navigation bar allows focus to be placed on the page’s content area and on the call-to-action sections (”Recent Projects”, “Consulting”, and “Ranting”). On this site, the user is drawn to these larger elements, while still being able to find the primary navigation bar at the top of the page.
Only on screens tall enough to show the three big buttons at the bottom. To me, Important Navigation Stuff On The Bottom makes much less sense, unless it’s repetitive menu items in a footer. What if the user doesnt’ think to scroll down? I’ve been dumb enough to fall for that: I thought I was seeing the whole page and for whatever reason didn’t notice the scroll bar.
Re the eye scans:
Even though two of the screenshots above show sites that have left-hand navigation, those elements on the pages did not draw the users’ eyes as often. In fact, the top sections of the pages were more successful in drawing the eyes than were the left sidebars. Therefore, expanding the content area to fill the left side of the screen is usually a better approach, since the user’s eyes aren’t going to bother with the navigation bar anyways.
Gee, could that be because once a user has navigated to the page they want to read, they ignore the menu because it’s not the content they are trying to read?
I can’t tell if those screenshots are people searching an entire site for something or not. Nielsen shows eyescans of folks searching for the US population on the Census site and they go to all the search sections: main navigation, sub navigation, the search bar, pretty much everywhere but where the population is posted (due to it looking like an ad, according to the research). But people seemed to have zero problems finding all the ways to navigate.
I appreciated that he actually linked to the study, as it was interesting to skim through. Here’s what they say about top navigation:
[quote=““the study””]
A common finding throughout this eyetracking research is that items placed in close proximity to major headlines are viewed more because of “visual bleed.” An item close to a prominent headline will receive more direct views (or “fixations”) than an item that is separated by white space or a visual barrier like a rule (or line).
We observed the same pattern with top navigation, which is closest of all the navigation placements to a homepage’s top headlines and also received the most views of the three navigation placements.
[/quote]
So, top navigation wins because it’s next to big-lettered headers, not because it’s simply at the top of the page. At the article level, they state that left-side navigation wins out.
At the bottom, in the summary, they state that their findings mean top-level navigation is ok and that is it not lost to visitors even if it’s just a small thin bar strip at the top as some web designers feared. It does not recommend switching from left navigation to the top.
The Nielsen eye scan in the article asked people to read content, not look for stuff. People will act differently depending on the task. Of course they didn’t look at the elft menu: it’s easier to not look at when you’re trying to read, while a top menu, being close to larger text of a header, will.
The truth is, those two benefits (namely, the flexibility to use longer link names, and the ability to easily increase the number of primary links) may be indicators that a site lacks purpose, is poorly organized, and was designed without much thought given to content or site goals. Boasting about the maintainability of a vertical navigation bar is not a valid benefit if it is accompanied by a vague purpose and poor structure.
Lawlz, let’s see an international site with large menus dealing in multiple, multi-length languages with horizontal navigation being better than left or right. They are not easy, but doing horizontal anything means you need to think extra super long and hard about how you’re going to deal with wrapping.
His list of sites where he considers the use of the left-side navigation as “good” don’t seem much different from the ones that are “bad”… I esp couldn’t see what was better about the Sensis site. Why isn’t he arguing for that site to switch to horizontal menus?
While it’s intersting, and while I usually consider users as morons (we have to, because when we build a page, everything is much too obvious to us), I also consider those who surf the web to know how to use site navigation and where to find it. Sites with mystery menu navigation or cleverly blended into the page with images are a problem, but I wasn’t convinced by this article to change any sites I have with side navigation to switch over to top navigation. I did like the links to studies, so it’s a worthy article to read.
A complaint by an actual user of any of my sites would convince me much much more (tho yeah that’s unlikely… best to do actual user testing with the particular site).