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Our company has recently requested the knowledge of a “usability/user experience” consulting group. Upon review and analysis of our various sites (which included user testing and usability labs) – they’ve concluded that users tend to ignore a “tab” structure navigation and react more positively to a “left hand navigation” structure.
I disagree and personally believe the outcome of the testing is skewed for a variety of different reasons. However, I thought I should propose the issue to the group here and see if we can get a consensus. While opinions are always welcome, I’d really appreciate any articles, studies or statistics that discuss this topic. -
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CommentAuthoradjustafresh
- CommentTimeAug 6th 2006
As a user experience designer who has sat through a few usability tests for different projects, I can probably offer some insight... I have found that users are accustomed to both the left nav and tabbed navigation formats. Many times these navigational components can work in conjunction with each other: the tabs acting as main and left nav acting as secondary navigation. Ultimately though, it depends on the website (content and design) and target audience in question. More experienced users have absolutely no problem with tabs, while less experienced web users (usually older audiences) tend to prefer everything on the left side.
Unfortunately, all I can provide at the moment is anecdotal evidence, but I'm sure that there is some information out there to cite if necessary. -
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Here are some very interesting heatmap tests conducted on various sites
http://www.etre.com/blog/2006/05/five_days_five_heatmaps/
take a look at Amazon's heat map: http://www.etre.com/blog/2006/05/five_days_amazoncouk/
you can see it's pretty even... I personally don't think users "ignore" tabs, like adjustafresh said, left navs and tabs can work in conjunction with each other in many cases.
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