世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey by goo Research into web site navigation issues. At the end of October they interviewed 1,093 members of their montior group with five or more years of internet experience by means of a private internet-based survey. 50.05% were male (interestingly, lower than the usual goo monitor ratio of closer to 60%), with 19.0% in their twenties, 44.2% in their thirties, 26.4% in their forties, and 10.4% in their fifties.

Regarding scrolling left and right, I recently got a new mouse with a scroll wheel that goes left and right as well as up and down. However, I can’t say I’ve actually ever remembered to use the left-right feature, and in fact it causes more trouble than it’s worth as a wheel-click in my Opera browser opens a link in a new window, but it’s too easy to accidentally push the wheel to the right at the same time, causing Opera not to recognise my click.

Q1: Where do you most prefer to see a web site’s menu? (Sample size=1,093)

Top	46.1%
Left	39.8%
Right	11.3%
Bottom	2.3%
Other	0.5%

Q2: What do you think about big web pages where you have to scroll? (Sample size=1,093)

Scrolling up, down, left or right is no problem	9.6%
Scrolling up and down is OK, don’t like left and right	80.2%
Left and right is OK, but don’t like up and down	1.0%
Don’t like scrolling up, down, left or right	9.1%

In other words, nearly 90% dislike needing to scroll left or right, but only 10.1% dislike up and down.

The report also notes than in a survey back in October 2003, 45% were dissatisfied with their mouse, with the top gripe being the lack of left and right scroll functionality.

When asked about what makes a site difficult to use, the top complaint was not surprisingly pop-up windows, with 784 people, or 71.7%, choosing this reason. Next was interstitials, or full-screen adverts before getting to the real content or in between pages on the same site, selected by 624 people or 57.1%. Next was Flash or other animations starting up on page open, chosen by 571 people or 52.2%. Music playing on page load came next, with 48.3% or 528 people annoyed by this practise.

Q3: When you open a site and there is a Flash or other full screen animated advertisement, do you usually watch it? (Sample size=1,093)

Watch to the end	8.9%
Skip after a little while	56.9%
Skip as soon as it starts	32.2%
Other	2.0%