Setting the labels aside, one question about this navigation menu, or for that matter any navigation menu, is how the order is chosen.

One option is alphabetical sorting, which is very easy to do provided you know the sequence of letters in the English alphabet. As Jakob Nielsen points out, however, alphabetical sorting is rarely a good way to go.

For most questions, either

• users don’t know the name of the thing they want, making A–Z listings useless; or
• the items have an inherent logic that dictates a different sort order, which makes A–Z listings directly harmful because they hide that logic.

Nielsen believes that selecting an appropriate navigation order is highly dependent on the context of the navigation, and that alphabetical ordering is usually not appropriate. If a logical sort order exists, use it, or go by what users have judged to be most important through their own browsing of your website.

In lists of items, make sure the ones the user is most likely to want come out on top or are made to stand out.

This logic seems to make sense. It seems obvious, right? By putting frequently-clicked links ahead of other links in a navigation menu, users should be able to find what they need more quickly. In psychology, this is known as the order effect. The order effect is a psychological phenomenon that describes a bias in the interpretation of a list of information depending on the order of presentation of that information. Early studies found that information at the beginning of a list was learned better than information in the middle. A related concept, known as the recency effect, suggests that items at the end of a list can be recalled more accurately as they are fresh in the reader’s mind.

Taken together, the order effect and the recency effect suggest that the best navigation menu would put important content at the top or bottom of a navigation menu—less important links should be relegated to the middle.

A recent study conducted by Alex DeWitt and published in the Journal of Usability Studies challenges the order effect justification for ordering by importance. DeWitt performed a meta-analysis of several website usability projects over one year at his research firm. Each study, utilizing eye tracking, followed the same methodology. Combined, the meta-analysis includes date from 15 unique navigation menus and 147 unique participants.

The major dependent variable in DeWitt’s study is Time To First Fixation (TTFF), which is “a measure of how many seconds elapsed between task start and fixation inside an area of interest.” In this study, the areas of interest were navigation menus, so TTFF would be the amount of time from the beginning of a task until the users eye fixated on an item in the navigation menu. According to the order effect and recency effect, we should see significantly lower TTFF numbers for items toward the beginning or end of a navigation menu.

Quick reminder: In research, significance refers to statistical confidence. Given a predetermined confidence interval, a  significant result means that the data observed is probably not due to noise (sampling variation). The larger the effect size and the larger the sample, the easier it is to get significant results. This is why large dragnet surveys are able to find correlations between completely unrelated things. Remember, though that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

DeWitt was unable to find statistical evidence that the position of navigation items reduced TTFF.

It was found that items in the last half of the menu took 8 seconds longer to locate on average than those in the first half. However, the Spearman‘s rank correlation did not show a significant relationship between the distance of the item from the centre of the menu and its TTFF for either items in the first half of the menu or the last half (p = 0.439 and p = 0.989, respectively).

This is a very interesting finding because it implies that items toward the beginning (or end) of a navigation menu are found any more quickly than items in the middle of a navigation menu.

DeWitt concludes:

There was no significant relationship between the distance of a menu item to the centre of the menu and the time elapsed before users first fixated on that menu item. There was a slightly increased performance when locating items in the first half of the menu as opposed to the second half. It‘s interesting to speculate on what insights we would have if a significant relationship had been found: If users were usually faster at looking at and finding items at the beginning of a menu, it would be clear evidence for site designers to place all the most important items at the beginning of a menu and the less important items at the end. It could be argued that many designers follow this practice anyway, although this study has shown no evidence to show any benefit to that.

What can we take away from the research?

DeWitt offers one main takeaway: Do not spend much time deciding the order of menu items on the basis that it will help users find the items more quickly.

If we spend less time on ordering, we can spend more time on developing appropriate labels and fine-tuning design aesthetics. I will sum it up as: The words matter, the order matters less.

There are exceptions, however. Some conventions, like ‘Home’ being the first link and ‘Help’ or ‘Log In’ being on the opposite periphery, are helpful as they will meet user expectations.