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The more a site lives up to the user's
expectations, the more he likes it. Don't try to be different just
for the sake of being different but stick to the current conventions
and give the user a layout he can immediately make sense of.
Greatest common denominator
Most likely, your site is not the first site a user visits.
Users learn from their experiences on other sites and they build up
expectations based on these visits: if a certain
element is situated in the top left corner of the page on most sites
then that's where he will look for it on other sites as well. This
doesn't mean that there's always only one right place for every
element of the interface but it does mean the possibilities are
limited. For example, in some books the table of contents can be
found at the beginning. In other books it's at the end of the book.
But never ever is the table of contents put somewhere in
the middle.
Conventions
Research into user behaviour has made it possible to draw up a
list of a number of current day standards or conventions. Respect
these conventions if you want to make it easy for users to
immediately understand your layout. Going against the grain will probably make
you stand out from the crowd but it will not make your site very
easy to understand.
Navigation
Most users, both beginners and more experienced ones, expect a
site's main navigation to be on the left side of the page. Second
level navigation is also expected to be mainly on the left, although
the right side of the page is also an option. An overwhelming
majority of users expects the link to the homepage to be in the top
left corner of the page. A minority spontaneously thinks of the top
of the page as a place where the main navigation can be found.
Advertisements
The majority of users expect to find advertisements like
banners, buttons and links to related sites at the top or right side
of the page. This also explains why top or right hand side
navigation generally isn't a very good idea. Not only don't users
expect to find navigation there, they expect these zones to contain
ads, and since most users aren't very interested in ads that makes
it even less likely they will look there to find important
information like the navigation.
Search
Research by Jakob Nielsen shows that 80% of American sites puts
the search feature in the top right side of the page and that users
have come to expect to find it there. In Belgium, both the top right
and the top left side of the page are very popular places for the
search feature.
Els Aerts & Karl Gilis
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