Comments on: Challenging the Status Quo: Audi Redesigned

By: Wuju

Wuju — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, I completly support the Right Hand Nav. I have in many occassion argued and supported the use on Right Nav and this article gave me solid facts to support it in the future. Thanks.

My hypothesis why right nave is better are as follow;

1) It’s better to use right nav to free up the priceless left restate for say content from What’s New to the full body text. After all, our eyes read from left to right, so why would we put repeating element like a nav on the left. Left Nav people argue why would we want people to learn a new system when Left is the standard and a big usability No No. Quess what it doesn’t seem to make a big difference in time as stated in the article.

2) Mouse movement plays a big role on how fast people navigate. Because the nature that the scroll bar is on the right, it is far faster and more user friendly for our mouse arrow to stay on the right if we employ Right Nav in our site. Its would reduce or mouse from travelling across the screen when we need to navigate (back and forth, back and forth). I would even argue that the majority of the content nav text or image links tends to be available after a paragraph say, “Read More” would end on the the better right half of the screen. So why not Right Nav.

That’s just my 2 cents and thank you for reading it

By: peter

peter — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I wonder if the two focus groupers did not like the right handed nav because they were left handed? Was this taken into account?

By: mike

mike — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

But regardless of the usability of the right hand nav, does moving it really communicate “innovation”?

Websters says innovation is “the introduction of something new”.

Right hand nav is nothing new. It’s just different than most, and relying upon positioning of navigation to communicate branding seems weak, at best.

By: Greg

Greg — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The right hand nav is often a common problem. We are trained (at least in western society) to look at pages left to right. When something so critical as navigation is on the right side of a page, unless we read hebrew (right to left) it will of course cause UX problems.

By: al

al — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

“Razorfish, Germany wanted to address the fact that users surf with different browser window sizes. We believed developing pages for one fixed size is fundamentally inappropriate for web design and ignores the basic flexibility of the medium.”
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I find this statement interesting given that the Razorfish site is a fixed width site. However, I must say that I liked the Audi site. Although I prefer the nav to be on the left or top, where they have and how they use it seemed fine. My one exception with the site is the search…it seems hidden (below the right hand nav) and contains some horrible tabs that hide some, as far as I can tell, pretty useless features (why, for example, do they hide the link to their “Glossary” in a tab located behind the search field???).

By: Andrés López

Andrés López — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Good move by RF…!

I see right hand navigation is a good way of closing off an interface, especially in left aligned non-liquid sites.

It also pushes the content ahead of navigation, which in itself brings contextual browsing, something we are seeing less of nowadays.

By: Lindsay Evans

Lindsay Evans — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

“A style sheet (XSLT) controls the three possible arrangements of modules for a given template depending on the user’s browser size”

—-

Okay, I got rather excited at the prospect of a mainstream commercial site using client side XSLT, but upon viewing the source, all I could find was references to the XSL-FO namespace.

All of the “jumping” seems to be done via JavaScript (in particurlar the file http://www.audi.com/include/js/dynscale.js, which just seems to be swapping the content of various elements around). Still pretty neat, but not what I was expecting.

By: Paul Watson

Paul Watson — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

RHN seems a natural and obvious progression to me. I find in most cases while reading content I have unconciously moved my cursor over to the RHS of the page. It is also easier to move to the right than to the left, sure only marginally, but then margins do count.

As for reading… Yes we read left to right, which is perfect for RHN. After reading an article your eyes most likely are on the RHS, ready to see the RHN and click a new topic/section.

And as pointed out RHN means content is more centered and prominent, a definite good thing.

By: sherlock_yoda

sherlock_yoda — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

What I like about this article is that RazorFish took an ‘experience’ or ‘brand’ decision (i.e. put the navigation on the right-hand side in order to be distinctive / innovative), but *then* thoroughly user tested the decision.

I think this is a healthy direction – focus on the overall goals / branding/ experience and then thoroughly test anything new or unusual. Don’t just discount unusual ideas – they may work for a particular audience / context.

It was also good to see a reasonable sample size being used, and this sample being targeted.

I’d use the term ‘controlled innovation’ to describe this process. Though, I agree with Mike that moving an interface element isn’t really innovative, though it may be distinctive.

Sherlock soon to be married :0)

By: Lee Fleming

Lee Fleming — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

When I built my first two or three sites way back in the days when I didn’t know anything about usability other than how to make things work, I used right-hand navigation. It made sense to me since the scrollbar is on the right. RHN used to be pretty common on the web. I don’t know when, or why, it almost completely disappeared.

Based on the usability results for RHN vs. LHN, I suspect that the location of the navs don’t significantly affect usability one way or the other, as long as 1) the navs are visible, 2) it’s clearly navigation & not something else, and 3) navs are labeled properly (no mystery meat).

It’s interesting to see the resurrection of RHN. Though I highly doubt it serves the purpose of making Audi’s site stand out from those of other carmakers: ooh, lookie, the navs are over here, this MUST be Audi’s site. Yeah, right. Colors probably would make more of a difference – at present, when I see those grays it means I’m at Audi, or BMW, or Mercedes, or Jaguar, or Porsche, or Lexus …