Teaching old dogs new tricks
One of the aspects of website design that is a constant balancing act is choice between new-and-different and old-and-understood. There are many 'design patterns' that users already understand, and using these in a design has a pretty high chance of making your site easier for a new visitor to use. To give a specific example, if I put a bunch of bold text links at the top of the page, in a line, at a similar level to the logo, most people will assume this is the main menu. This is because this particular approach has been used over and over again, and so has become familiar to most regular internet users.
Sometimes this is a good thing. I wouldn't necessarily want to have to reinvent the wheel with each new site I design. Likewise users don’t want to have to learn each new site they come across as a fresh concern. But what if the existing design pattern is wrong? Well, then we have a problem.
I was recently pointed towards a post on uxmovement.com concerning search buttons. It’s a great post, and I recommend having a read, but I have some difficulty imagining that positioning the search button on the left of the box will ever gain much popularity. It is doubtless provable that positioning the button on the left is more usable, but because the existing layout is so very well established I cannot imagine users feeling comfortable with it.
It reminds me of the change in theUK, from right-hand to left-hand side indicator stalks. Sometime around the 1970’s, all the major European manufacturers started producing just one set of column stalks for both left- and right-hand-drive cars, as a cost-saving measure. Previously, the position of the indicator on British cars was on the right. This is for the simple ergonomic reason that you will almost certainly want to change gear and indicate at the same time at some point. It is for this same reason that left-hand-drive cars have the indicator on the left. Perhaps because there were far fewer motorists on the road at the time, or perhaps because the change happened over some years, we (the British motorist) just put up with it and got used to the clunky, less ergonomic set-up of having to operate the indicators and gearlever with the same hand.
Well, now we’re used to it, and it is not uncommon to hear people complain when they drive a Korean or older Japanese car, fitted with an indicator stalk on the right, that it is ‘on the wrong side’. Of course it isn’t: it’s on the best side, from a usability point of view.
Likewise with the article mentioned above. Positioning the search button on the left of the search box might well be better for all sorts of reasons, but I wouldn’t fancy your chances of convincing a billion web users that it was change for the better. Designers and site owners are responsible for these design patterns at the point of inception, and if we get them wrong we may well end up stuck with something we wish had been better thought out in the first place.
Personally, with every Mini I’ve ever owned I’ve always fitted a set of pre 1974 indicator stalks, and enjoyed the superior ergonomics in that part of the car, if not in the rest of it so much.