Usability News has a nice article on
Examining Three Common Menu Item Layouts, Cascading vs. Indexed, by Michael Bernard & Chris Hamblin.
They did tests on three types of navigation. Indexed (everything on one page, center of page, categorical), Horizontal (with dropdowns), Vertical. The shocking thing that can be made from this study is that significant search time differences between the three menu item layouts were detected that strongly favored the Index menu layout. There was also a non-significant trend that slightly favored the subjective opinion that this layout was less disorientating than the other two layouts. Moreover, participants selected the Index as their first preference choice more than the other two layouts. The poorest performer, both objectively and subjectively, was the Horizontal layout. It is possible that distance the menu was away from the center of the screen contributed to its poor participant performance. In fact, one participant commented that this layout “was more difficult to see and reach than the others because height on the screen.”
Tagged As Info Architecture, Interaction Design, UI Design, Usability
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Posted at 12:00 PM