Abstract
The authors of this paper are conducting research into the usability of menu positioning on web pages. Other researchers have also done work in this area, but the results are not conclusive and therefore more work still needs to be done in this area. The design and results of an empirical experiment, investigating the usability of menu positioning on a supermarket web site, are presented in this paper. As a comparison, the authors tested a left vertical menu and a fisheye menu placed horizontally at the top of a page in a prototype supermarket web site against a real supermarket web site using a horizontal menu placed at the top of a page. Few significant results were observed, which gave rise to the conclusion that overall there were not many differences between the tested menu types. Furthermore, an explanation for the results observed is discussed in terms of cognitive, physical, functional and sensory affordances. It is suggested that observation of the affordances may be a more crucial aspect to menu design than the actual menu positioning.
Highlights
Most web sites make use of some sort of structure for organising content
The independent variables were (1) the types of menu being investigated and (2) the type of task involving using the menus described, in finding a series of typical products sold in supermarkets
The results suggest overall that in a supermarket shopping web site context, whether the menu is placed horizontally at the top of the page or is replaced with a horizontal fisheye menu and a left vertical menu does not seriously affect interaction time, accuracy and subjective perceptions
Summary
Most web sites make use of some sort of structure for organising content. The content is usually accessed by means of various different types of navigation elements. It is our aim to explain our results in terms of the theory of affordances as expressed by Hartson [7] in the context of user interfaces Overall this is a very important area of research because the success of a web site involves several different aspects. This paper will firstly discuss some related works in similar areas to our research This will be followed by a description of an experiment carried out aiming to determine effectiveness and user satisfaction of different menu positioning on web pages. This will be followed by a presentation of the main results and linked to the theory of affordances [7].
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