A usability and universal design investigation into the use of persistent headers in web pages

Abstract

This thesis investigates users’ preferences and performance of persistent headers on websites. Persistent headers and non-persistent headers are compared through a questionnaire and experiment. Two websites are setup identically with the only difference being the header. One website has a persistent header, and the other one has a non-persistent header. All 24 participants are testing both websites through tasks. Time and wrong clicks are measured in this within-users experiment. Results from the experiment and questionnaire are analyzed to measure users’ preferences and performance of the two header types.

Results show persistent headers performed better and was preferred by the participants. The experiment was performed on a laptop with a 13-inch screen. Future work could investigate smaller devices like smartphones to see if it the results are different. Using websites on smartphones is popular, and today many websites use partially persistent headers on smartphones and smaller screens in general. (Laubheimer, 2021) Different devices, screen sizes, and partially persistent headers was not part of the scope of this thesis and is something that could be further investigated in future work.