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Ask HN: Are web layouts inherently right-handed?
I've been trying to figure this out for sometime. Most websites(Gmail, FB, Twitter, Bing, ....) put their logos to the top left and the menu actions to the top right(Login, Logout, Profiles, Write a new tweet). Does this have anything to do with assuming a disproportionately right-handed population? While handedness is abstracted out through hardware, is there still a perception bias between left and right handed people for web layouts?
- thristian 16y agoI would guess this is not a handedness issue, so much as a cultural issue - most websites I view are designed by people who live in a culture whose predominant script runs left-to-right, top-to-bottom, and so the websites tend to put the most important thing (the logo) at the top-left; secondary broad-scope things across the top, and so on down the page. Here's the front page of Al Jazeera's site (the first right-to-left language website I could think of): http://www.aljazeera.net/ http://www.aljazeera.net/ Notice that the logo is at the top right, what I assume are the main navigation categories stretch leftward, and sidebar-esque things run down the length of the left-hand edge of the page. There may be a subtle link between handedness and website layout, in that it's easier for right-handed people to write left-to-right (you don't have to worry about your hand on the paper smudging the fresh ink), but I'd say writing direction is more useful. I'd be interested to know if cultures with a predominantly vertical writing direction have their idiomatic website layouts, but the only two I can think of (China and Japan) have been so thoroughly exposed to Western text-layout (especially in technological contexts) that I suspect they use the same idioms as Western sites. Indeed, http://www.baidu.com/ http://www.baidu.com/ has an almost identical layout to Google.
- mhlakhani 16y ago"what I assume are the main navigation categories stretch leftward" That's about right. Another slightly better example is this site: http://www.stc.com.sa/cws/portal/en/?favouritLang=en http://www.stc.com.sa/cws/portal/en/?favouritLang=en If you click the text in Arabic at the top right, it shifts to the Arabic view, and all the text and navigation bars move to a position that's more appropriate for right to left reading.
- thristian 16y agoWow, that really is a better example. Not only does the text and navigation change sides, and not only do the three adverts at the bottom swap around, but even the content in the ads moves.
- sisirkoppaka 16y agoNice example! The whole page mirrors about - looks like the cultural factors(language) outweigh individual factors(handedness) in general.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago>That's about right. Another slightly better example is this site: http://www.stc.com.sa/cws/portal/en/?favouritLang=en http://www.stc.com.sa/cws/portal/en/?favouritLang=en >If you click the text in Arabic at the top right, it shifts to the Arabic view, and all the text and navigation bars move to a position that's more appropriate for right to left reading. The Aljazeera site does that (in reverse) for the English language version. They change the colour scheme too to orange (blues complement, don't know if that is significant). The English version looks more image intensive to me as well - perhaps their English language users have more bandwidth (or lower literacy? or ...).
- mhlakhani 16y ago> " The Aljazeera site does that (in reverse) for the English language version. They change the colour scheme too to orange (blues complement, don't know if that is significant). " The color schemes on the site match those of the TV channels, so that's where the blue/orange color change came about from. > " perhaps their English language users have more bandwidth " That's about right, bandwidth is still hard to get at good rates in the Middle East...
- notahacker 16y agoAnother factor which encourages the placement of main content on the left is that by default horizontal scrollbars start at the leftmost position, so only secondary content is obscured if the browser viewport is a little narrower than a fixed-width page layout Is this browser behaviour reversed with right-to-left language OS/browser default settings?
- todd3834 16y agoI assume it is because those websites are orginally developed for left to right languages like English. Also, I'm not sure it makes much difference which hand is controlling your mouse in those examples.
- sisirkoppaka 16y agoInteresting. So, for right-to-left scripts <textarea> and other text inputs would have to be mirrored from the current trend. Wonder if the Arabic version of Wordpress or similar software does this...
- epo 16y agoI have always assumed it was related to how the typical person's eye scanned a page. Is this even affected by handedness or just for example the fact that we write left to right in the English language? (the web was after all first written in English) Regardless it is now just a convention that people are used to, like the QWERTY keyboard, changing might theoretically result in better performance but the disruption to expectations would mst likely cancel that out and result in a net loss of performance overall.