A survey of left and right hand navigation menus on the web: “The hypothesis that the left-hand navigation would perform significantly faster than the right-hand navigation was not supported. Instead, there was no significant difference in completion times between the two test conditions.” (Yes, I’ve been teaching web design.)
I'm Jill Walker Rettberg, author and professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. I co-direct the Center for Digital Narrative, a 10-year Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence, and I lead the ERC project Machine Vision in Everyday Life. This site started as my blog in October 2000.
Jamie Blustein
One of the most digestable sources of tips for web design is at usability.gov. The guidelines are especially popular.
Yeah, I teach human factors, and web programming. And I attended the panel discussing that web pages guidelines at CHI’03.
Jamie Blustein
The webpage address was missing from my previous comment, so …
* The documet is at http://www.usability.gov
* The guidelines are at http://www.usability.gov/guides
charlie
One of the things that I noted about that text is that while the navigation menu placement may not be important, the content placement could be:
“As Nielsen (1999) speculates, a right-hand navigation should direct user attention to the content of the page, which would then be on the left side of the page. This seemed to explain the longer actual completion times of Group 1 for tasks one and two in this study. Moreover, an extra focus on content could increase user interest and understanding of the topic of the page or site.”
So for bloggers, who want to emphasize their content, right hand menu’s may be best.
Jill
(I fixed the links in Jamie’s comment, so now they’re visible!)