I was having a conversation about interface design with Matt Schmidt who quoted Steve Jobs saying that if the interface is not intuitive it is not right. That took me back to my interface design class as a computer science undergrad. We were often told that right handed control was more intuitive to users – unfortunately I can no longer cite the research that was based on. They complained that the web was wrong because web pages overwhelmingly have lefthand navigation.
If the righthand navigation is really more intuitive, why is it confusing to navigate a web page with righthand navigation (if you ever come up against one of those rare pages). The truth is that we have socially accepted the idea that – at least on the web – navigation is generally on the left of the page. This is social negotiation.
When I had the thought I believed that it connected to one of the underlying assumptions in the Strauss book, but upon looking into it I find that it does not directly connect to any one assumption.
Matt Schmidt commented on this post, but he is having problems with the trackback functionality of his new blog.
Here is his post.