Comments on Challenging the Status Quo: Audi Redesigned

cesar — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:20 GMT

Cool site, but:

Is funny they talk about innovation when they have 2 combos to determinate the user’s location. The idea for “continent + country” is goofy.

I mean, why you don’t use a zip code validator or links for the most common locations and one combo for “all of them”.

In the mac I am using, the cookies doesn’t keep track of my preferences and each time I go to the site I need to select “continent + country”.

Then for the “resolution wizard”, one thing is the resolution screen, another is the window size. This is an old discussion.

Cesar.

Filthy Rich — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:20 GMT

Sorry just read through second paragraph again, and I’m not suggesting that RHN is the right way, as I believe the location and interaction of navigation system(s) has as much to do with brand as the rest of the graphical, copy and functionality execution.

Filthy Rich — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:20 GMT

Just a quick note regarding discussion as to the innovative approach of RHN, and nothing to do with graphical execution which is nice.

This is not a new concept just one that is rarely used, I remember reading many years ago a Fitz or Fritz Laws of usability, who I believe wrote some the microsoft guidelines, recommends RHN for the reason of being near the scroll bar meaning less movement.

Creative almost definately, innovative not really, re: the changing layout again creative but not really innovative, wasn’t the scaling layout something first approached through tables, the fact that they are using dhtml is an advance but nothing more at this stage

A more than competant piece on first glance, well done RF you’ve done your job!

A small side shot, regarding the brand aspect – anyone else find it amazing how many online brands visually look the same, whilst having incredibly different brands offline?

PS. The comment were the Focus group testers left or right handed is pretty funny, as a right hander strangely I can still see use the left hand side of my screen ;-)

Anyway luv the site good discussions generally.

Mike — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:20 GMT

Here’s the lingering issue I have around site design as it relates to communicating branding:

Let’s just assume for a moment that Audi truly *has* a brand quality of innovation (I have no idea if they truly do or just think they do, most of my time is spent working on vehicles 30+ years old where 2 powered windshield wipers would have been innovative).

How do they know that trying to achieve that same brand quality in their website design is an effective way of communicating the brand quality in their product?

In other words, if I’m in the market for a high-end car (and assuming Audi’s site is mainly intended to help sell cars), and I come to Audi’s site to see what their cars are all about, does a high-design site like this help or hinder that visit? There are times I wish sites would become more or less transparent, just a digital window to the company and product, and not call any attention to themselves.

It’s ironic, at least in a small way, that Audi can say they’ve achieved innovation in their cars, yet that car has to adhere to some pretty strict design standards (location of controls, etc.).

On the web, though, design standards had to be challenged in order to achieve that “innovation”.

Put your Navigation right, left, top, bottom…doesn’t matter to me. Let’s just figure it out and move on already.

Melvin K — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:20 GMT

At the recommendation of RHN, it still depends on who your users and what they are using it for.

Standards & Innovations are definitely necessary. For a site like Audi, Innovation makes good sense in terms of business, brand etc. But for other sites it might not be a good decision.

A lot of people might take this to be the next “Cool” thing and start implementing for sites & application where it would cause more problems than benefits.

Innovate for necessity sake not for innovation.

PS:I’m a left hander(who holds the mouse on the right hand) and I love it…=)

Thank You.

Lee Fleming — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:20 GMT

When I built my first two or three sites way back in the days when I didn’t know anything about usability other than how to make things work, I used right-hand navigation. It made sense to me since the scrollbar is on the right. RHN used to be pretty common on the web. I don’t know when, or why, it almost completely disappeared.

Based on the usability results for RHN vs. LHN, I suspect that the location of the navs don’t significantly affect usability one way or the other, as long as 1) the navs are visible, 2) it’s clearly navigation & not something else, and 3) navs are labeled properly (no mystery meat).

It’s interesting to see the resurrection of RHN. Though I highly doubt it serves the purpose of making Audi’s site stand out from those of other carmakers: ooh, lookie, the navs are over here, this MUST be Audi’s site. Yeah, right. Colors probably would make more of a difference – at present, when I see those grays it means I’m at Audi, or BMW, or Mercedes, or Jaguar, or Porsche, or Lexus …

sherlock_yoda — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:20 GMT

What I like about this article is that RazorFish took an ‘experience’ or ‘brand’ decision (i.e. put the navigation on the right-hand side in order to be distinctive / innovative), but *then* thoroughly user tested the decision.

I think this is a healthy direction – focus on the overall goals / branding/ experience and then thoroughly test anything new or unusual. Don’t just discount unusual ideas – they may work for a particular audience / context.

It was also good to see a reasonable sample size being used, and this sample being targeted.

I’d use the term ‘controlled innovation’ to describe this process. Though, I agree with Mike that moving an interface element isn’t really innovative, though it may be distinctive.

Sherlock soon to be married :0)

Paul Watson — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:20 GMT

RHN seems a natural and obvious progression to me. I find in most cases while reading content I have unconciously moved my cursor over to the RHS of the page. It is also easier to move to the right than to the left, sure only marginally, but then margins do count.

As for reading… Yes we read left to right, which is perfect for RHN. After reading an article your eyes most likely are on the RHS, ready to see the RHN and click a new topic/section.

And as pointed out RHN means content is more centered and prominent, a definite good thing.

Lindsay Evans — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:19 GMT

“A style sheet (XSLT) controls the three possible arrangements of modules for a given template depending on the user’s browser size”

——

Okay, I got rather excited at the prospect of a mainstream commercial site using client side XSLT, but upon viewing the source, all I could find was references to the XSL-FO namespace.

All of the “jumping” seems to be done via JavaScript (in particurlar the file http://www.audi.com/include/js/dynscale.js, which just seems to be swapping the content of various elements around). Still pretty neat, but not what I was expecting.

Andrés López — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:19 GMT

Good move by RF…!

I see right hand navigation is a good way of closing off an interface, especially in left aligned non-liquid sites.

It also pushes the content ahead of navigation, which in itself brings contextual browsing, something we are seeing less of nowadays.

al — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:19 GMT

“Razorfish, Germany wanted to address the fact that users surf with different browser window sizes. We believed developing pages for one fixed size is fundamentally inappropriate for web design and ignores the basic flexibility of the medium.”
—
I find this statement interesting given that the Razorfish site is a fixed width site. However, I must say that I liked the Audi site. Although I prefer the nav to be on the left or top, where they have and how they use it seemed fine. My one exception with the site is the search…it seems hidden (below the right hand nav) and contains some horrible tabs that hide some, as far as I can tell, pretty useless features (why, for example, do they hide the link to their “Glossary” in a tab located behind the search field???).

Greg — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:19 GMT

The right hand nav is often a common problem. We are trained (at least in western society) to look at pages left to right. When something so critical as navigation is on the right side of a page, unless we read hebrew (right to left) it will of course cause UX problems.

mike — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:19 GMT

But regardless of the usability of the right hand nav, does moving it really communicate “innovation”?

Websters says innovation is “the introduction of something new”.

Right hand nav is nothing new. It’s just different than most, and relying upon positioning of navigation to communicate branding seems weak, at best.

peter — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:19 GMT

I wonder if the two focus groupers did not like the right handed nav because they were left handed? Was this taken into account?

Wuju — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:19 GMT

Yes, I completly support the Right Hand Nav. I have in many occassion argued and supported the use on Right Nav and this article gave me solid facts to support it in the future. Thanks.

My hypothesis why right nave is better are as follow;

1) It’s better to use right nav to free up the priceless left restate for say content from What’s New to the full body text. After all, our eyes read from left to right, so why would we put repeating element like a nav on the left. Left Nav people argue why would we want people to learn a new system when Left is the standard and a big usability No No. Quess what it doesn’t seem to make a big difference in time as stated in the article.

2) Mouse movement plays a big role on how fast people navigate. Because the nature that the scroll bar is on the right, it is far faster and more user friendly for our mouse arrow to stay on the right if we employ Right Nav in our site. Its would reduce or mouse from travelling across the screen when we need to navigate (back and forth, back and forth). I would even argue that the majority of the content nav text or image links tends to be available after a paragraph say, “Read More” would end on the the better right half of the screen. So why not Right Nav.

That’s just my 2 cents and thank you for reading it :)