Navigation - What to scroll?

Over the years, we have learnt that users hate to scroll. So, when designing a webpage we need to take care of whats visible above the fold and which parts need to scroll.

Navigation is an important aspect to consider when designing webpages. This is usually achieved by menus - a collection of links. If navigation menus are so important, then why do we not find them when we are in the middle of a long page. Thats because they are above the fold and you'll probably have to scroll a lot to reach there. Isn't there a better approach??

For example, consider a webpage with menus on the left, banner at the top and content in the center. Menus are used for navigation and the user may use them after partly/entirely reading through the contents. Basically, the menus are most used region on the page. Typically, if the whole page is scrollable, then the menus are not visible when you at the bottom of the page (consider the content spans many pages) and the user would have to scroll back to bring them back into view. Instead, it would be better to have the menus fixed, not scrollable. That way, the menus are always visible and moreover this doesn't affect the contents space.

What happens if the left pane of the page contains some more information apart from menus? If we have the left pane non-scrollable, then part of the information showing below the fold will never be visible. The non-scrollable menus will occupy some of the real estate on the screen and it wouldn't release this space on scrolling. In such cases, it doesn't make sense to have menus non-scrollable. Having horizontal menus would probably be better idea then.

If the menus were horizontal, fixing them would reduce some of the visible space. But considering the size (height) of menus this should be fine. This would mean that menus are on the very top of the page and the banner (if any) would appear below it. This is fine, because the banner occupies significant space and will have the same effect as before and the menus which were usually found at the bottom of the banner, will now be above it and will stay there for ever. So, the user would always have to go up to navigate the site. Also, now the contents can go wider. One side-effect of this is - when the page is opened on a Site Specific Browsers (SSB), the menus are at the very top like most of the desktop applications. Also we may benefit to certain extent by Fitts' Law. One caveat could be - traditional menus on webpages occupy more space, they are spread out. This is a bit constrainted when the menus are placed at the top. The menus, at max can span the width of the screen. Secondary and tertiary menus can answer this.

One radical idea would be to have a small region at the top-right corner of the page non-scrollable. When the mouse hovers over this region, a drop-down of menu appears or we could just have a select box there to choose menus from. This is unobtrusive to the user, since the top-right corner is rarely used by webpages for any important information display and also navigation becomes easier since it is always visible on the page.

The outcome of such ideas could only be evaluated when implemented and reviewing the feedbacks of the users. However, there is no stopping from generating ideas!!

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