Hi RK,
NW04, the platform we are running SDN on, does provide a widget and feature to collapse the left hand side. This would disable the need to horizontally scroll.
However SAP User Management Experience group is doing a lot of user testing and research with SAP's applications. They are setting cohesive UX standards across our applications. Although our situation is a little different because we needed to pay attention to web standards as well. (even though, of course, we are using the biggest application of all. ) we can learn from their experiences and advice.
The Left Nav Collapse widget confused us when we first saw it. We investigated the use of this functionality on the web and could not find an example of it anywhere.
- the interaction is not intuitive because it hasn't been seen online very often (if at all)
- the images used in the NW04 portal application are misleading
- when a user makes a mistake and clicks on it, it is hard to recover from because they may not have realized what happpened. this is a real danger with introducing new functionality to the web.
Meanwhile if you take a stroll through the global top 500 sites (including microsoft.com) you'll see that most sites with left navigation areas are fixed (aka non-collapsible) thus there is not a clear industry standard established for hiding/showing them based on the most frequently used web sites.
http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500
In Microsoft OS, panels like this (such as Help) are typically opened by selecting from the function menus across the top of the screen (or keyboard shortcuts) then collapsed (hidden) by clicking the [ x ] widget. Thus no standard hide/show toggle widget.
On our Corporate Portal, we find all the widgets questionable in terms of usefulness, usability, and semantic expression.
[ + ] [ - ] Typically represent the zoom up/down functionality in most familiar desktop apps -- thus are a gross/confusing misrepresentation in the Portal. These two symbols are also used in a toggle widget in a tree control to reveal/hide hierarchical information.
[ x ] means "close" a window NOT "collapse" a panel as misused in the Portal.
> is generally used as a toggle widget to reveal subordinate hierarchical information. It's also been used gratuitously to represent all kinds of other functionality which has made the semantic of this symbol very ambiguous to users and typically doesn't test well for usability.
We are looking into the possiblity to create our own widget, so we can test it with some users and then implement it to remove the need for horizontal scrolling.
Kind regards
Marco
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