Right Side Navigation
I am working on a design for a company I work through and I am going with a right-side navigation. One of the individuals in the company mentioned ditching the right-side and going left and it made me think, why? does usability change at all? It is a valid question and suggestions because most sites have navigation at the top, or left and sometimes bottom. This lead to a search on the usability views on right-side navigation. What I came up with is that there is a German study that shows users being more productive with right sided navigation than with left or top. Part of the reason being that the scroll bar is closer to the navigation and from what others are saying most of the time their mouse is hanging around the right side of the screen anyway. I obviously use right sided navigation on this site and part of the reason is that the content is ultimately the important part of my site. Who really cares what links I have on the right? I want users to see my content first instead of seeing something on the navigation that catches their eye and then losing them on that page.
It appears some people do not like the right side navigation, why I am not really sure. One thing I like about right side navigation is the space below it is not very important or will contain ads and really doesn’t interest me when I visit a website. If if you are using left side navigation there is always this white space next to the content or full of ads that I don’t want to see. This leads me to believe it is more visually appealing to the user.
I would be interested to hear from some of you about your opinions of RSN (right-side navigation)
March 5th, 2007 at 1:05 am
I use right sided myself because I designed it mainly when deciding how me eyes would react to it and I found reading links on the right was easier since the content doesn’t disturb you….while if I put it on the left…..people would be looking at me content ONLY and not bother about things on the left side…perhaps which could help them……that’s perhaps how I thought about it.
hey buddy do you offer email subscriptions for your blog? I prefer reading it through mail since I don’t have a favourite rss reader….I have been changing some much that I stopped using any of them
March 5th, 2007 at 1:29 am
Email subscription was just removed because nobody was using it and it was not verifying the entry. Your email was added and when I redesign I will implement my own email solution.