Navigation - Horizontal or vertical?
el_reverend (134 pencils) | Thu, 2007-04-19 00:15Hi members,
I thought I'd post an interesting question to you all: Do you as designers prefer web site navigation to be horizontal or vertical? If vertical what side? Why? And as site visitors what do you prefer? Your friends or spouses? I would be very interested what you guys think about navigation and your preference.
Commenting on this Forum topic is closed.
Both!
If vertical it should always be on the left.
The reason is accessibility.
Remember that not everyone is computer literate and people just starting out on the internet are easily confused, not to mention partially sighted people whose life is made much harder by non-standard navigation.
www.jamnittygritty.com
. . . You naturally read left to right. If in the Middle East (correct me if I am wrong) Right to left? and in Asia in China up and down ( I think). Though its generally accepted that because the internet relies a lot on an international audience and computers generally have a 'skew' to left to right, you should adhere to this rule. Check out Jacob Neilsen's guide on usability: http://www.useit.com/eyetracking/
He uses a technique to show how the typical (western) internet user reads a webpage. . . VERY interesting.
In short don't forget monitor sizes, if I have to scroll across to get information then you've failed in a little way. Read Jacob Nielsens alert box columns. VERY interesting.
"Try not, Do! or do not, there is no try."
-Yoda
Very interesting read!
:o)
www.jamnittygritty.com
You guys might be interested in this:
http://www.poynterextra.org/EYETRACK2004/main.htm
"Where's your navigation?
While testing several homepage designs, we varied the placement of a navigation element: top (under the flag or logo), left column, and right column.
Navigation placed at the top of a homepage performed best -- that is, it was seen by the highest percentage of test subjects and looked at for the longest duration . . . None of the 25 sites we surveyed used right side navigation. It's rare, but you can find right navigation in the news website world.
It might surprise you to learn that in our testing we observed better usage (more eye fixations and longer viewing duration) with right-column navigation than left. While this might have been the novelty factor at play -- people aren't used to seeing right-side navigation -- it may indicate that there's no reason not to put navigation on the right side of the page and use the left column for editorial content or ads."
"Try not, Do! or do not, there is no try."
-Yoda
I started paying attention to my own browsing habits and noticed that I do tend to use the right hand navigation when it's available far more than I had expected when it's available.
A lot of this has to do with the fact that in the site's I've been visiting, the left hand menu tends to be a fixed site navigation where the right hand site is a more fluid contextual navigation with dynamic links that are relevant to the actual page you're viewing than the site as a whole.
As I tend not to develop large scale sites and am focused on smaller basic HTML/CSS sites than dynamic PHP etc. It's not something that I've really had to focus on, but this thread has definitely given me food for thought.
www.jamnittygritty.com
Ancient asian writings were actually done on slats of bamboo strung together, and hence they began to read up to down, from right to left. Because of western influence, convenience or perhaps technology, most everything nowadays (except old old text books) are read the way we do.
the orientation of your navigation largely depends on the layout of the rest of the site.
i have used horizontal navigation in a lot of the sites i have been doing lately using a
/- . They come out really nicely and are easily customisable.
I think as a general rule, if your site has only a small number of pages in the navigation [say, a maximum of eight] you can use horizontal, otherwise it's probably best to stick to vertical. of course, that is a very, very general rule and you should decide based on your layout.
andrew harrison
http://andrew.harrison.org
I agree with harisson, i always use horizontal nav if the number of items in the menu is decent. But if the number is too small( like 3 or 4) or too big, i use a vertical design.
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always outnumbered, never outgunned
Very interesting thoughts here,
I have found myself preferring right hand side navigation (especially sub-sections of a site). I have read a few Nielson books on design and accessibility and base a lot of my work on them. The eye-tracking information is very interesting. I would assume that navigation also changes with age. People accustomed to traditional reading might be looking 'typically' at a screen, at the top or left of the screen. Advanced web-users (or multi-input addicts like ourselves [how many screen or desktops are you looking at a day?]) may be more all over the place and able to disect presented information quicker, and possibly thereby look at the right hand side of the screen more often. I will have to buy his book now to see if my theory holds true. Well, happy designing then. Anyone remember when web 'design' was having text on the screen that wasn't on your computer?