Poll Results: Off Screen Navigation Use on Mobile/Desktop

The results are in! Nearly 5,000 voters weighed in on the last poll to decide if the off-screen “drawer” navigation style that has swept mobile design is appropriate for larger screen (“desktop”) designs. You could answer:

  • It’s not good on any site.
  • It can be good on any site.
  • It’s good for mobile sites, but not desktop sites.

Only 10% of you were of the opinion that the off-screen nav isn’t a good idea on any design. So the vast majority approve of it at least on small screens. The remaining 90% were fairly evenly split. By a nose, at 46%, you voted that off-screen nav can work on any design, making it the most popular choice. 44% said it’s only appropriate on mobile sites.

Here’s a visual breakdown:

See the Pen GtCqp by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen

Personally I’d lean toward the pragmatic. I know I asked for you to vote without any context of a particular design. That’s just to get a general gut instinct and sense of the community vibe around this idea. But I’m sure most of us make real life decisions, especially design decisions, based on the real facts in front of us. If a drawer made a ton of sense on a large screen desktop site design, we’d probably go for it. But of course this idea was born from the reality that small screens are small and moving navigation away from the primary screen gives us more real estate to work with and bigger tap areas in both places. So to put it on a large screen design where that isn’t as much of an issue, might be weird. But then again, possibly less and less weird over time as mobile designs dominate what people interact with.

Poll in the sidebar another day or so before the next one goes up. Check out the polls archive for full, real time results for this and all past polls.


Poll Results: Off Screen Navigation Use on Mobile/Desktop is a post from CSS-Tricks

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