Comments on: Why Left Search Buttons Perform Faster Than Right Ones

By: Mostyn Swain

Mostyn Swain — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 21:26:41 +0000

I can understand a LABEL (text only) being on the left of the search box, but the activation button should be on the right (in my opinion, no research done) as its the natural progression from reading/typing from left to right. Also the actual placement on the web page is another issue I find. I’m right handed so I want all my selection boxes/menu’s on the right as that’s where my hand drifts to (I know that seems crazy since I was talking about left to right above). I’m not a web designer but this has been a fascinating read and I will be researching any real quantifiable research so when I do talk my web designer I am well informed to get traffic to my web site.

By: Behnaz Montazeri

Behnaz Montazeri — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 11:18:43 +0000

Wow! I came up with UX Movement by searching about buttons and now I am trapped in. So many useful, concise, and to-the-point articles about anything in UX. love it.

By: Luca

Luca — Wed, 23 May 2018 08:59:14 +0000

Just bumped on this today, and surprised that no one raised an a11y alert – users with learning disabilities will find the placement of the action button before the actual input, very confusing and might not be able to perform a search. Adopting something that performs faster for some users while making it worse for others is, imho, bad UX.

By: anthony

anthony — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 23:02:00 +0000

This is an old article and user attitudes towards search have changed. Search buttons aren’t offered as often anymore because users are so used to pressing enter after they type. But I still think it’s necessary to include for the user who copies + pastes their words instead of type.

There was a lot of friction in the comments, but ultimately this article claim was correct. Left search buttons do perform faster. But more specifically it’s not because of the placement of the button, but the placement of the label. User scan patterns lean left so a label placed on the left of a search field will have higher visibility which leads to quicker completions.

By: Moath

Moath — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 18:57:49 +0000

Why not just testing it!!

Nice idea no doubt, but after reading all the comments, don’t you think if you provided some worthy test to your approach, you could have proved the point?

I myself am thinking of testing it…