Menu layouts within e-commerce shops

There are multiple ways to build a menu within an e-commerce site. In the study performed by J. Hamblin, & Barbara S. Chaparro (2003) it was shown that the users prefered the Index menu over the corresponding horizontal and vertical menu layouts due to the fact that they could perform their tasks faster and easier on that menu. In this study different menus were tested within an e-commerce site to see whether or not this result still applies today. However, in addition, the usage of images within menus would be an addition to test to see whether or not images affect the results. However in this study, the different users are divided into three groups to differ their preference. Those with little, medium and a lot of experience with computers. The hypothesis was that the Index Image menu would be the most preferred and that images would decrease the amount of time it takes forusers to perform their tasks. The hypothesis was to be only partly right. Result shows that the horizontal menu containing images was mostly preferred by allgroups even though it was not the fastest menu among all of them to use showing that images did not necessarily lower the time it takes to perform tasks. The result also shows that the group with the least amount of computer experience also had a preference for the Image Index menu which does agree with the hypothesis, but however, this only applied to one group therefore the hypothesis can not be considered completely correct in that aspect. However, the experiment proves that there is a preference for images within these menus