On 18/09/12 03:55, Brandon Harris wrote:
No surprises here, but nice research.
http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2012/09/11/sticky-menus-are-quicker-to-...
I kind of agree with that, but I don't like the idea of a navigation bar sticky at the top if you can't hide it. Sure, it makes navigation easier, but if what you're caring about is the page content, it gets annoying by taking up useful content space.
See for instance the given example of http://www.rodolphecelestin.com/ There we have a long page with a ribbon at the top. It'd be ok if it could "hide" at the right. But that way it looks "intruding". If I'm reading the page, I want to have as much content as possible in one screen. Currently two designs could fit per screen if the ribbon wasn't there (I see how it ends behind the bar), or if I manually do a fine tuning with the scroll bar to only miss a little bit, but that's annoying to the users. Of course better.png and skills.png do not fit together, probably not even without the navbar without manual tuning, but seeing that the developer added me an unneeded piece of duct tape gives me bad feelings.
OTOH I find that the sticky bar of http://ryanscherf.net/ is lovely (the only flaw is that not all of those icons are descriptive enough).
Jon Robson wrote:
Can someone send me the research that says that users use Wikipedia's search tool? (...)
Note that the research was done on navigation alone, without including text reading [1]. I usually build the urls in the address bar by hand, by the way. :)
[1] http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2012/09/11/sticky-menus-are-quicker-to-...