Hi, I have a facing pages document and I want to have TOC guides on the left and right of each page, so the question is if I read the guides from buttom to top on the right page, should it change to top to buttom in the left page or should it be the same? is there a standard for that?
2 Answers
No standard for this i assume, both options will work for the left guides.
Top to bottom feels more intuitive, but a bottom to top orientation could make more sense depending on the type of content you are displaying. If you are doing a high-volume publication (yellow pages, etc) with a lot of small sized text where people will browse through quickly, bottom to top could work better.
Elements should flow sequentially in the reading direction.
That means in English reading direction is left to right. So, buttons would be 1 - 2 - 3 upwards on the left, then 4 - 5 - 6 downward on the right. Basically the reverse of your screenshot. - (edit) However, it does depend on the text baseline and reading intent. If, as you have it, the text has its baseline facing outward, then you have things correct in the screenshot.
I didn't notice the baseline until I viewed the screenshot larger.
The goal should be to keep the eye moving in the same direction when reading the elements. You don't want users to read, then have to backtrack in order to find the next element. You want a nice, smooth, flow for the eye.