Re: new website: draft 2.1, panic over "community"

[Graham Percival]

On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 12:32:48AM +1200, Bill Mooney wrote:
> as I understand it, the use of vertical rather than horizontal  
> navigation links is to be preferred - maybe, I think! :)

A few other people have mentioned this, so I looked into the
literature.  A quick survey shows that horizontal menus are easier
than vertical.  (cascade -- the "mouse hovering and drop-down"
menus -- are unsurprisingly terrible for usability!)

For example, in
----
Dong, Jianming; Salvendy, Gavriel. "Designing menus for the
Chinese population: horizontal or vertical?" Behaviour &
Information Technology 18.6 (1999). 27 Jun. 2009
< http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/014492999118887 >
This research investigated the language differences between
English and Chinese and the implication on the design of menu
presentations for computer interfaces. Eighty Chinese subjects and
twenty American subjects participated in this experiment. The
results of this research indicated that the menu layout should be
congruent with the language being used. Horizontal English menus
result in better performance than vertical English menus. However,
vertical Chinese menus result in better performance than
horizontal Chinese menus. It is important to design menus based on
the language being used rather than the linguistic traditions of
the population using the interface. The effects of menu layout
also depend on whether the search task items were presented in
English or Chinese.
-----

Horizontal menus saved an average of 1/2 second and reduced error
rates by 35%, when compared to vertical menus.  (for native
English users)


I think it's safe to assume that speakers of other European
languages react the same way -- AFAIK, all the European languages
we have translations for are read left-to-right, and use spaces to
delimitate words.  Japanese is *not* the same, but it would be
tricky to add a separate navigation system just for one language.

Cheers,
- Graham