A Comparison Between Left- and Right-justified Site Navigation Menus

[lee wilde]

I have been wracking my mind trying to organise my site in a logical way, and on e of the things which I've had difficulty deciding on, was whether to place the login box and other modules I want to appear on all pages....in a left or right-hand column.

I've come across this very interesting article today, which may be of interest to anyone else trying to decide on left or right navigation.

A Comparison Between Left- and Right-justified Site Navigation Menus
by James Kalbach and Tim Bosenick
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v04/i01/Kalbach/
Source: Journal of Digital Information, Volume 4 Issue 1
Article No. 153, 2003-04-28

[rbl]

I've read a lot of studies like this where even eye movement was measured.
I've voted right although a very small percentage of the times I use left. It depends on your target audience but before a long rant about it let me just say why right.

95% of my work are community sites. Places where people spend a lot of time of their day browsing around, doing what people normally do in community websites =)
Place the menu in the left side and by the end of the day, an active member would have travelled a couple of miles back and forth between the menu and the elevator located on the far right side of the window. (Yes, I do know the existence of mouses with scroll-wheels but not everybody has one)
So placing any highly clicked items on the right side column, increases your navigation speed and unburdens your mouse millage.

[phlogiston]

I must admit that I always use left-placed navigation stuff away from the top bar as that is where my brain expects it by habit but the sites I visit with right-sided nav menus feel easier to move through, even with a scroll-wheel, closing tabs is on the right and even just that I am right-handed and read left-to-right means the mouse cursor sits happier towards the right when at rest.

Of course using vba's CMPS it would be really easy to give registered members the option of swapping left & right columns to suit their own choice...!

[lee wilde]

rbl - yes, I am finding that a lot of bloggers feel very strongly about right-hand navigation for some of the reasons you mention. I had no idea what you meant by "elevator"...you mean the vertical scroll bar on the right? Ha, I picked up something new today :-)

phlogiston - that is a cool suggestion about giving a member the ability to swap left & right columns! I'll have to come back to that idea.

[rbl]

Lee, I really don't know its name but I've always seen people calling it that =)
Its the block in the middle of the vertical scroll bar that changes size according to the vertical size of the page.
But you got the picture =)