

Ask HN: Are web layouts inherently right-handed? - sisirkoppaka

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?
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thristian
I 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/>

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/> has an almost identical
layout to Google.

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mhlakhani
"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>

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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>That's about right. Another slightly better example is this site:
<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
> " 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...

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epo
I 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.

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todd3834
I 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.

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sisirkoppaka
Interesting. 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...

