Five days / five heatmaps 7 May 2006

Jason 11 May 2006 04:38 PM

Is it possible for you to do one of these with a right hand navigation menu? It'd be interesting to see how that looks in comparison with the left hand navigation maps.

Nev 12 May 2006 05:10 PM

Echoing Jason's comments, I'd like to see the heatmap with a right hand navigation system. The Razorfish/Audi study suggested that, if designed correctly, they can be just as effective as left hand navigation systems so it would be interesting to see if your tests confirm that view.

Jonas K. Sekamane 14 May 2006 02:40 PM

I've looked through the 5 heatmaps and sites, and tried to see if stronge and clear mouseover-effect played any role, and i don't see any changes in users focus surrounding the navigation or links. Have you discovered anything? Were users more keen to click the navigation on sites like HMV, where the pink mouseover-effect is very strong?

Mark 16 May 2006 01:29 AM

I love these sorts of studies, however, the fact that you aren't focusing on each website's target audience as your test audience, to me, means that the study can only talk in general design terms, and even then it's not that useful. For example, as a male, if I go to Marks and Spencers' homepage and see a feature promo for lingerie then I'm probably going to look immediately at the navigation to see if anything at all in the site is likely to be relevant to me. Yet your conclusion is that since people didn't spend much time looking at the feature promo then Marks & Spencer are wasting (or using inefficiently) screenspace. Now that has to be a spurious conclusion. However, if you studied only women in the demographic being targeted by the feature promo then you would have more meaningful results. Finally, all of your studies show very heavy inclination to the navigation from a homepage. Of itself, this doesn't help much (as per above - how relevant is the website to the users you selected, do they even use websites such as the ones you put in front of them eg. to purchase products online, to access similar information) - if your study also included mention of what users went on to do after seeing the homepage then it would help. EG Are people looking at the homepage panel, not liking it then looking at the navigation AND then finding pages of interest to them where they look at the centre part of the page layout - or is the site so irrelevant to them that they would (without your supervision) just click away from it? Anyway, good to read. Keen to hear your feedback.

Arik 16 May 2006 04:22 AM

In response to the first comment:

You don't really need to do different navigation orientations. Its fairly easy to predict or anticapate that users will use primary navigation more than anything on your website. Unless your site is highly interactive with forms and whatnot, that would be an only exception.

Emma 16 May 2006 04:57 PM

Like others, I think that it would be interesting to have seen the effect of right hand navigation; I'd also like to see what would have happened with an audience of users who aren't so familiar with online shopping sites.
My father is very much a novice web user, but rang up in great excitement when he'd managed to order something from Amazon. I suspect that of all sites listed, Amazon is the most likely to get novice users, as it doesn't have a high street presence - so you don't have the choice as you do for the rest of those you've got listed. (Granted, you could argue that books can be bought elsewhere, but to a significant proportion of the country, Amazon is known as an online book seller - whereas Currys is known as a high street retailer.)
Someone made a comment somewhere about the fact that people don't often go to a site just to browse, they tend to go to buy things; again, I wonder if users are more likely just to browse Amazon, and use the other sites typically to shop.
It's a useful survey though, thanks.

Ian Fenn 17 May 2006 05:30 PM

I'd also like to see the results for a website with right-hand navigation. Strictly speaking, right-hand navigation should be more effective due to its proximity to the vertical scroll bar. There's a shorter distance for the pointer to move - important for users with mobility issues or business users with a notebook and touch pad.

Stuart 22 May 2006 01:10 PM

Have you done this experiment on a google results page? I'm interested to see if people click on the sponsored ads before the organic results.

Mark 25 May 2006 04:38 AM

I used to be the producer on the Audi website in Australia... they are one of the few large sites to have right hand nav. Personally I prefer left and top nav although the right hand nav does keep navigation within a certain quarter of the screen. I'll check out your response. Thanks again for a stimulating debate!