heisel.org

A case against sidebars

Monday | March 15, 2004 | 5:40 pm  

I was read­ing this good arti­cle about soft­ware com­modi­ti­za­tion over at OSDir.com, today and I paused when I hit the article’s side­bar on the use of the word com­mod­ity in Shakespeare’s works.

I was torn… a ‘graph to the left me, a ‘graph to the right of me. The side­bar was longer than one screen (and what is one screen­full anyway?), so I decided to con­tinue read­ing the piece, but I didn’t come back to the sidebar.

The short story, embed­ded in the text of a large piece, has been a staple of pub­li­ca­tion design for a while now, but I don’t think it makes the tran­si­tion to the small screen very well.

With printed mate­r­ial, my eyes merely need to scroll down the column of type until the end or the jump, and then I can move back to the side­bar. When I’m done with that page I’ll flip the page and repeat the process with sto­ries that catch my inter­est. (Oh, if the Web had such a simple interface…).

But on the Web (or any screen-​based medium), I actu­ally have to scroll up.

There’s been research that shows users prefer scrolling to paging, and I think between that behav­ior and the preva­lence of scroll-​wheel mice, there’s no doubt that you’re better to have your reader scroll than page.

I think there are two strikes against embed­ded side­bars (unless they’re very short — like 2 graphs short).

1. The first is inter­est. If I’ve gotten to a story-​level view of an arti­cle, then there’s prob­a­bly a fairly high inter­est level on my part in the article… I drilled down through all your index pages, so give me my con­tent. Pre­sent­ing related con­tent is good, but in the format of a side­bar, I’m torn between the arti­cle I looked for and the new content.

2. The second is phys­i­ol­ogy. When we’re pre­sented with a single column of type, our brain and eyes are ready to start at the top, and go down­ward in a side­ways motion (take your pick). When I get to the bottom of a single-​column story page, I’m ready to move on, it just feels unnat­ural to move back up to read.

Per­haps the best solu­tion is to pro­vide a list of related links, includ­ing side­bars, right at the top of the article.

In addi­tion, sidebar-​style con­tent — con­tent that really should be attached to its main bar — could be placed at the end of the story.

On a single-​column, single-​page story, that’d be the log­i­cal place to put it.

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