Button Placement

For many, many years, I recommended very specific survey navigation button placement:

The "Next" button was always in the bottom-right corner of the browser window, while the survey "Back" button was always in the bottom-left corner.

My reasoning:

• I've read several studies about banner placement, and the bottom-right corner freqently achieved the best click-through rates.
• Because of all the vertical scrolling required to read Web pages, it is very natural for a respondent's cursor to gravitate toward the bottom-right corner of the window.
• These positions seemed to emulate the natural flow of how we read traditional media. To advance to the next page of a book or magazine, you grab the page on the right. To return to the previous page, you grab the page on the left.

When I set up these guidelines, 17" monitors were considered large, very few people had widescreen displays, and 1024*726 was a high, rare resolution setting. While the same reasoning is still applicable today, the instruments on which our surveys are displayed has changed.

Nowadays it is not uncommon for a respondent to stop by and attept to complete your survey using a 24" widescreen monitor set to 1920*1200. Using my old recommendations, and this configuration for comparison, the radio buttons for a Yes/No question would be approximately 15" away from the "Next" button in a maximized browser window. This is way too far to require a respondent to move their mouse between pages.

In keeping up with the spirit of my previous suggestions, but adjusting for newer, wider displays, I now recommend centering your buttons at the bottom of the page, with the "Back" button on the left, and the "Next" button on the right.