Left Nav vs. Right Nav
Posted by mbsnapp on December 23, 2007
synoppsys: Give right navigation a chance.
In response to our need for a new web site design, our lead developer recently developed a very nice style guide: an html page demonstrating elements of his stylesheet. My initial reaction was, this looks great. My next knee-jerk reaction was, we need to move that right navigation to the left, as if it were some unspoken law of the web. Because so many web sites use left navigation, including all of the sites in our portfolio, I’ve never questioned the pattern. I’ve assumed there must be solid usability research supporting left navigation, although it would not seem to be in alignment with my recent reading on eye-tracking.
“Google’s golden triangle” and Nielsen’s “F” pattern were discovered in research on how users visually scan web pages: the studies conclude that our eyes’ go first to the left hand side of the page and move right and then downward. That would make total sense for English-speakers: we read left to right, top to bottom.
I did some googling on the topic of navigation and came across an informative article summarizing the literature on the topic and the results of a research study comparing left vs. right navigation. The researchers concluded that the location of navigation resulted in no significant difference in task completion times. Most importantly, in my opinion, is their finding that “users appeared to be indifferent about the location of the navigation menu subjectively”.
Anecdotally, when we presented the right navigation design to a user group, no one raised the issue of navigation location. When we probed about the right nav, one attendee stated that she did notice that navigation wasn’t in its usual location, but she had no problem with it. Another attendee said that it would make sense to put content on the left, navigation on the right, because of the way we read.
It would seem to me that left navigation is a convention. Usability experts would tell you that’s exactly why we should continue to place navigation on the left: because that’s where users expect it. I’m not so sure. In fact, I think there are more compelling arguments now to support right navigation: namely, why wouldn’t you want to put your most important content where your visitors’ eyes first stop?
