Slashdot Mirror
Web 'Rules' Changing?
sempf writes "Lots of things have changed since we started this HTML. The IMAGE tag was a nice change, and multimedia with plugins like Flash provide a new look.
What interests me the most, however, is the change in two of the hallowed GUI 'Rules' - the three click rule and the 7 +/- 2 rule. The Three click rule (which states that any page in a site or function in an application should be accessible in three clicks) was just debunked by Josh Porter in an article called Debunking the Three Click Rule. The 7 +/- 2 rule states that a user should never be presented with more than 5-9 choices at any given point in the site or application. James Kalbach has an excellent article debunking that rule at Dr. Dobb's Journal.
Worried that there will be no more 'rules'? Never you mind - the Government has come up with New Rules for us to follow."
I'm worried that I didn't know about any rules, and that there are any in the first place.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
The thing about rules like "three clicks", is that they are based on the pre-bubble notion of buzzwords. That doesn't work anymore in the web design field. Now we have to provide tools that the customers want to have, and design stuff so that they can easily access it. Document trees, under the nice standards at w3 are what has really changed with the internet, and not to mention PHP, Perl and free db solutions like MySQL and the other guys.
If users are leaving after 12 clicks now, like it says in the article, that says something about the level of web-smarts of the average user. But what I see in these charts, is a kind of "split the difference" research insight.
For clicking, it's 50/50 that people will go on to get what they want. For the percentage of unsatisfied users, it's 50% who are unsatisfied, according to their research.
What they've said is: "Users weren't any more satisfied with shorter clickstreams than they were with longer clickstreams. The satisfaction of users doesn't depend on the number of clicks."
So that means that in the old days, people were getting used to the infrastructure of web surfing, and things that were far away were annoying people. Today, people are used to the web... some teens have grown up on it, and therefore people as a whole are used to it. Therefore, things like design style and presentation mean more than how far clicks are, and if they know they can get what they want by going there.
Unlike real life, the Internet has no rules, be it content, language, format, or organization. These rules are generally asserted to better help web designers (as there are some horrendously designed sites), but they are by no means written in stone. Follow what you think is best.
A blog like any other.
The 7 +/- 2 rule doesn't apply on this site. On any given page, there can be what seems like 50-100 links! :D
Never you mind - the Government has come up with New Rules for us to follow
It clearly states on the website that they're guidelines, not rules.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
These are rules of UI design, not specific to the web... Bad headline ./
I wonder if streaming video embeded in web pages will ever become common place or even feasible? As networking technology improves websites get flashier and flashier....
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Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
I don't think there were ever any rules, just common convention. I mean, any good designer should keep all of these things in mind because they make sense, even some of the ones from the government... In the end the only thing that really matters is that Al Gore invented the internet and we should do as the government tells us! I wish Bush could set some rules, that would really make my day.
But maybe I am just old...
Not only is the Three Click Rule correct for Web sites but also applications. if you embed the final page/function so deep that the user can't find it, you might as well go back to CLI or just google to the final page skipping all the intermediate menus/BS.
That's a bit like finding out that violent conduct is banned in wrestling.
Beep beep.
So what if we have all these rules if the overwhelming majority of pages out there have Flash intros, content only accessible if you take the time to go through 20 intermediary pages? How many web designers actually know these rules (gudielines) actually exist? I for one strongly agree with these rules, since they enable you to actually USE the webpages, not simply drool over the shiny pictures, but most people out there simply don't know better.
Click #2, find link after futzing with page search if needed.
Oh, I'm sorry, I guess that violates the 5-9 items on a page rule.
I have better rules. How about ban senseless use of flash, annoying animated graphics, lazy conversion of printed matter to PDF documents instead of crafting true HTML pages, and sites with little or no content? But then again, who am I to argue with marketing "experts" who know what I want better than I do?
It seems they doesn't follow their own rules ...
No more Dancing Jesus.
Unless it's properly noted which site you swiped him from.
The "Three click rule" and the 7 +/- 2" rule are good rules for designing simple UIs (of which web pages can be considered a subset), but simple inspection can reveil the problem with this idea.
Suppose a UI were to scrupulously follow both rules. Then you would have a maximum number of choices of 9 ^ 3 = 729 choices. No more.
That may be great IF the number of choices you have is less than 729, and IF the choices can naturally be grouped in bunches of 9.
However, any complicated application may easily exceed this.
Moreover, people CAN deal with more than 7 choices, as long as the choices are somewhat related - Baskin Robins 31 flavors are all exactly that - "flavors". Imagine if a BR menu offered 31 choices of foods, drinks, plate colors, locations in the restaurant, server names, music, etc. ALL AT ONCE.
7 +/- 2 and 3 click are useful GUIDELINES. Just as saying "Using goto in C/C++ is generally a bad idea", or "pointing a loaded gun at any part of your body is a bad idea" are pretty good guidelines, there are times when you need violate them (e.g. error handling in the absence of exceptions, demonstrating a bullet-resistant vest, and designing a complicated piece of test equipment).
You should just use them AS GUIDELINES - "Hey, I really have a lot of items in this menu, perhaps I should take a break and see if I can come up with a different way to group them?"
www.eFax.com are spammers
The real trick will be convincing the thousands of bureaucratic departments to adopt these standards, and I just don't see that happening.
The combined government offices have one of the largest and most inaccessible stores of information on the planet. Maybe one of these years, that will change.
I believe that when you design a decent GUI for a website, 3 clicks to go anywhere comes automatically. And 5 to 9 options, totally depends on the targeted visitor of the site and the nature of the site.
That's why he put the word rules in quotation marks.To show that these are in fact not rules, just that some call them that.
"Be careful or be roadkill" - Calvin
Bravo! This article has all the elements required to get the Slashdot crowd riled up:
- 'Rules' of the internet *tweak*
- Flash *tweak tweak*
- Government rules for the internet *tweak tweak tweak*
But wait. I don't see Microsoft or SCO mentioned. Didn't want to blow your cover?
Case in point, "provide printing options." Any webhead worth her salt knows that providing a duplicate page just for printing is a waste of time and effort, when CSS can do it for you.
Yeah, right.
Wait... but that statement is a rule itself! So that's a contradiction so there must be atleast one rule.
Q.E.D.
Matt Fahrenbacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
Yes- and working well in my opinion.
I work for a very large government agency (100,000+ employees). With a LOT of websites. We are research oriented, and each and every little group puts up information in their field on the web.
In the past, it was just a thrill if people could put something up on the web- everyone rejoiced. Most of them were done by someone in the office who was willing to try to create a website, some coded by hand, others used Front Page, Dreamweaver, etc. Some were done by the son/daughter of the employees. But, every single site looked very different, most of them very, very bad.
I was actually hired to unify the look/feel/use of about 300 sites in one division, which is actually a very small percentage of the sites we actually do have.
We've set guidelines, we've created templates, we've contacted some people directly when their site was completely screwed up.
After 3 years, things are finally starting to look good. We still have a few 'rogue' sites, but generally, everything is where it should be.
We of course had to offer the same basic guidelines that the Deptartment of Health and Human Services did- in fact, I wish they had theirs set up 3 years ago, I would have just stolen everything there!
If we had continued with the process of creating sites that didn't work together, we would be doing a disservice to our clients- and WASTING the taxpayers money as everyone of our 'webmasters' learned the rules themselves. So I think this is a good use of taxpayers money- yes, they NEED guidelines.
No reason to lie.
1) Use as much stuff as you can. No matter how unnecessary it is, put it there. ...add your own.
2) If you plan creating something something, put a link to 'under construction' page with that thing's name. If you don't plan creating it, put that link anyway.
3) Put as many javascripts and plugin content as possible. Best if you make all navigation buttons using separate java applets, or the "enter" button with flash.
4) A right-click blocking script is a must.
5) Use freestyle HTML. No tag must be ever closed, let's see how the browser handles undocumented parameters, what about making up my own tags?
6) Never forget about "Make this page your homepage" button!
7) Graphics is everything. You may leave a 60x60px box for text content, but a huge background is essential. There should be at least half a megabyte of non-skippable intro in flash before the content proper.
8) Instead of creating thumbnails in your gallery, use height= and width= parameters on original, full-size images.
9) a href= is unfashionable. Use javascript to change pages.
10) It's highly desired to open the page in a new 'kiosk' style popup window. Let's force people to disable their evil popup-blocker software, nobody dares using buttons like "reload" or "back", only site-provided navigation is allowed!
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
That's exactly why. I agree that there are no rules, but there have been expectations built over the years - I've been writing web since 1990, and they sure FEEL like rules.
/. either, but a person sure gets flamed if they don't meet the invisible expectations! That's true of the internet as a whole, I believe, and those invisible expectations are changing somewhat.
There are no rules ar
S
/usr/bin/grep -i -E meaning life.txt
Some things will never change.
Once the WTO takes control to determine proper content ( ie censorship ), there will be rules.. laws, and penalties for useage, content, accessablity, etc..
Then its back to direct dial BBS for me..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Ah nice to see that people have finally done some research that factors in stupid people.
It is amazing how often the 7+/-2 'rule' is repeated and followed. It is an urban legend, see http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/jones02urban.html for a discussion.
Some clueless people think they can pull something like internet-rules out of their asses ignoring the fact that the internet is pure chaos with interfaces.
Wishful thinking of people who care only about their little nice dream world of theories because the real life hurts so much.
The 3-click rule gets to the importance of accomplishment -- getting that feeling of moving forward. Your typical e-commerce site takes several pages to enter credit card info, shipping address etc. But as I move thru it, I feel that I am accomplishing the task. On the other hand, if I go to the same site looking for a particular item to buy, I'll give their navigation and search tools about 3 chances to find the item before I move on to another site. If they can't get me close to what I'm wanting in 3 clicks, I'm out of there.
This is the secret that Disney has learned. Their popular rides have LONG lines, but they keep you moving. They entertain you in line. A much better experience than a typical amusement park, where you stand stoically in line.
The word 'rules' was put in 'inverted commas', not "quotation (or speech) marks".
I've just made the faux-pas of actually reading* the linked article that claimed that 3-click was debunked, and I don't agree.
/. karma. I promise I won't read the article ever ever ever again, so this should be a one-time problem for slashdotters, since obviously no-one else ever reads articles here.
The 3-click rule says info should be accessible within three clicks.
The article contesting this says they watched over 8000 user clicks, and most users clicked 25 times before 'giving up', when it appeared they were searching for stuff.
The gap that I see is in not more-deeply analyzing how the clicks of users related to depth-of-tree (i.e., 1-click from home, 2-clicks, or 3-clicks, etc.) or perceived website quality. It is possible that people spent 25 clicks wandering but resurfaced to 'home' several times in trying to find the proper 3-click path to their desired target.
My point is that truly debunking this concept would involve:
1 - looking for 'back to home' patterns in click streams.
2 - classifying users a few ways (Some people are too timid/stupid to use the 'back' button!)
3 - validating user satisfaction on usability of sites that honor/ignore the 3-click rule.
All the article does is prove that people are persistent, even in the face of crappy webpage design.
* - My apologies; I hope admitting that I read the article doesn't completely destroy my
As a PHP programmer what I really want in html is better form. There are a number of things on it that could be better, for example there is a number of forms avaible that aren't used in html, take spinbox as example. A btter way of passing variables would be great too, hidden fields aren't that great, making people use sessions or cookies instead.
Inside the user's brain...
BRRRRRRrrrrr TRONK TRONK BRRRRRRRrrrrrr...
*SMOKE COMING OUT FROM EARS*
Process interrupted (Site www.slashdot.org has too many links.)
Diego Rey
diegoT
Periodically, we hear about the rule of 7 +/- 2 from inexperienced interaction designers: Users can't handle more than 7 bullets on a page, seven items in a form list, or more than seven links in a menu. This has no evidence in reality - on the contrary. The psychologist George Miller's conclusions apply to what we can memorize - not what we can perceive.
Current research strongly supports that broad structures perform better than deep structures. Users can more easily cope with broad structures, they have a greater chance of getting lost in deep hierarchical structures, and new visitors are able to get a better overview of sites offerings from a broader structure.
read more: The Myth of "Seven, Plus or Minus 2"
W3C
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
The gov's usability site uses tables for lay-out and images for text. Better throw this article in the it's funny, laugh category - and link to the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These are much better IMHO. (for your own use, of course I agree that the government setting any standards for it's own sites is great).
It's all etiquette. If you want to present a good webpage, some de facto rules must be followed. Otherwise you won't get much traffic.
I think as the web matures, these so called 'rules' will be rewritten. No hysterical 'end of rules' proclamations need be sounded.
The 3 click rule made more sense during the bubble when there was a glut of sites for every category. Or when there really wasn't a definitive site for any one purpose. When a person knows there are a multitude of sites they can look at, they are reluctant to go too deep on any one site. I can recall using 3-5 search engines every time I was looking for something. I would look at the first result page and then try another engine. Now I only hit Google, but I'll look as deep as I need to.
The 7+/-2 rule is based on a cognitive psychological idea first put forth in an article by George A. Miller, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information. In it he argues that the average person can really only hold about 5-9 things in immediate memory at one time.
I don't believe that is an internet design 'rule' that should be ignored, too many choices in one space will overwhelm your average users.
But alas. I don't know about you but that sounds pretty innocent to me.
JAWSchlech "The secret to success is knowing who to blame for your mistakes." - Despair.com
Drafting users into a usability study, giving them tasks to do and monitoring how many clicks it takes them is a crap measure of the three click rule. Those users will try and complete the task given no matter how many clicks it takes.
Everyone has to care about these beautiful rules, because...?
The internet has rules??? I feel insulted...
The "no" comes when you have extra information which is required to give the printout context as a "standalone". One example might be a mail reader which has the From/Subject/Date in one frame, and the message body in another.
Of course, generating a whole separate page is generally a waste of time, IMNSHO. What I like to do is diddle the HTML of the frame during the print operation. I haven't found a great general solution for Moz yet, but trapping onbeforeprint/onafterprint in IE and relying on the window.print method (which even gets called with right-click->print) works marvy. onbeforeprint=diddle the HTML to include extra info; onafterprint=put it back the way it was. The screen won't even flicker if you have a reasonably fast box or you set that property which controls when the screen is redrawn (can't think of it at the moment).
Of course, you use CSS to make sure the layout will look right on the printer.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Words like "rules" and "laws" have, however, been known to have more than one meaning...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Man, this article is the most desperate display of wishful thinking that I have had seen since a long, LONG time.
Kudos to the author for spending time of his life to this amusing lecture. You rule!
> they are by no means written in stone
u les
who said they were?
here's a hint:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=r
3 A usual, customary, or generalized course of action or behavior: "The rule of life in the defense bar ordinarily is to go along and get along" (Scott Turow).
the point about the article is that the ideas of what constitutes good design are changing, not that there are or aren't actual rules.
> Follow what you think is best.
what an empty statement, what was I going to do before your wisdom? do what I think is worst?
The "rules" and the "users" are--hopefully--interdependent. Those rules helped train a generation of web users, and now the users are setting forth their own rules. "I won't go to a site that's slow. I won't go to a site where I can't find anything."
As people become more comfortable with the web, the rules should change to accomodate them.
Good content, at any rate, always trumps the rules. Look at...ahem...Slashdot.
Here's a site that presents the worst websites on the Internet from a design standpoint. These are the sites that break the web 'rules'. My favorite is Mystery Meat Navigation, where you have to float your mouse over some obscure design to see where the link goes.
The article on three clicks suggests to me that web users have become so accustomed to the horrible "navigation" on so many websites that they are willing to put up with a lot of frustration.
I think a better study would ask at what point does a user's frustration level increase beyond what they consider acceptable. In other words, what is their patience level.
-Thomas
The only rules that matter are those required for the specific users of your content.
The documents have much wider implications than is realised. The problem that is trying to be addressed applies just as much to databases and electrical equipment.
When people talk about engineers (by the way I am electronic engineer), they talk about somebody that is always trying to take a particular product or service and improve it in some way. In a way, webmasters perform a similar function. However, engineers have to work to guidelines before they can sell equipment due to quality control, health and safety legislation. These documents are written by International organisations, many of which are financed by Governments.
Without these guidelines, you would end up with the kind of chaos the Internet is generally now in. For example, if these agreements were not in place, you could purchase a mobile phone in the United Kingdom, but then you decided to visit France you would find that the phone wouldn't work, not because they had different phone operators, but because they used a completely different phone system. I know the USA uses a different phone system from the GSM used across most of the world, but at least many Tri-band phones are available that will work with both systems. Just imagine if there were 50 different incompatible standards across the world.
So what the document is trying to do is to tell uses of the Internet that they should wake up to the fact that companies that don't provide high quality concise information over the Internet, that is easy to use and understand, will not sell the goods.
There is a very good saying - K.I.S.S. - Keep It Simple Stupid.
Oh and a big Red PANIC!! button may not go a miss either, if somebody doesn't understand what is going on.
The Plusser
The guidelines recommends to optimize for screen resolution and fonts. I think that is a bad idea.
If the statistics that say most people have 800x600 screens are not already outdated, they will be soon. And how do you optimize for peoples eyesight. If I want bigger fonts I set the minimun-font-size in the browser or tell it to ignore font-sizes in webpages even if it breaks the design of some webpages.
How about just making pages that work with any font size and window sizes and then not use absolute font sizes?
I use it as a rule of thumb all the time.
The thing you need to think about though, especially on the web, is this:
It's not about having only 7 links on a page. It's about grouping. You can group links using colors, a box, a header or just placement.
The reason site maps are useless on most sites is because if you have a web site with a good gui, it is actually mentally cheaper to click a few times and wait for pages to load, than be overwhelmed by hundreds of links at the same time.
Will code a sig generator for food
Black background
Green neontext
Lots of dead links
A rotating green wireskull
A "Under Construction" sign
GIFs
If you do not follow the guidelines, then you might be smarter than those who does.
Whenever I need information about a product or application, I very much appreciate having access to a PDF version. I can take it with me on my laptop when I'm in the field or at a customer site, and I can archive it on CD in the event that the product is discontinued (or the company goes tits-up, leaving me with the maintenance issues.)
I've noticed that many companies have taken to presenting product data as HTML-only. I find that annoying because, assuming I'm interested, the first thing I end up doing is printing the HTML page to a PDF file so I can archive it. Usually I need to futz with the page formatting before I get a useful output, and that futz-time costs me time and aggrivation. I'm not advocating that all content should be PDF'd, but I do believe it has substantial value. Balancing the amount of HTML and PDF content presented is the tricky (and subjective) part.
I just fired this off to the admins of the site:
.
----
Hi folks
I have a few comments about your useability guidelines, most notably the font recommendations found at http://usability.gov/guidelines/fonts.html
While I agree that a 10pt font is ideal for many people, I think it's totally inappropriate for a website to ever set this. Many people are using high resolution or high-DPI screens where 10pt is unreadable; many need larger fonts because of visual impairment; some may want smaller text, etc. Setting an explicit point size will override any preferences the user may have made in their client.
I have visually impaired users at work, and they find many websites apalling - I've had to set their browsers to ignore the website's font settings to make many sites useable. This is not a good situation for anybody, as the site designer uses font size and face as a significant cue for navigation and reading.
As such, I'd love to see you note on your useability guidelines that font sizes should only be set uding relative properties - the 'em' measure in CSS, the '%' measure in CSS, the 'larger'/'smaller' descriptive terms of CSS or the 'SIZE="+-n"' measures in the HTML <FONT> tag. CSS 'pt' or 'px' should never be used where accessability is a concern.
For an illustration of this problem, I suggest that you find a computer with a 19" monitor capable of at least 1600x1200 (or a 21" that can do 2048x1536) and try to use sites that are set to 10pt. Ideally find someone a bit older for this test. For even more fun, use an OS other than Windows that is not guaranteed to have access to the specific fonts the website designer previewed their site using.
Another issue I think well worth mentioning is the use of leading/kerning controls in CSS, especially combined with the use of absolute measurements. Setting the leading in type may well make things look very 'crisp' and 'professional' on the designer's screen, but often makes the content almost unreadable for people who don't have the same fonts, use large or small type, or otherwise differ from the configuration of the designer's test systems. Leading specified in 'px' or 'pt' is especially bad, as this causes each line of type to overlap when the font size is larger than that the page was designed for; it also causes lines to space out very annoyingly when using smaller type sizes. If leading must be specified, it should be expressed in relative measures like 'em' or percent, so that the leading scales with the type size.
One final comment: some sites, while designed to work with a range of type sizes, fall down severely when viewed with _extremely_ large type as is needed for someone who is partly blind. One of the staff at work has serious vision problems, and she finds that on many sites the columns do not expand with the type. If the type is large enough that only one word fits in each column, this is hard to read - but as words aren't broken, if the columns are a little narrower than type can overlap. This makes a site unuseable. Again, it's easily fixed - column and table sizes should be specified in relative measures such as 'em' or percent, never in pixels or point sizes.
Unfortunately, certain buggy web browsers - such as many versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer - have severly broken CSS implementations that make this more difficult than it should be. It is still possible to design good sites that work well even for people who need or prefer different type sizes, however - and I think this is an important thing to encourage.
As monitor resolutions get higher and computer use even more universal, this will no doubt become more of an issue.
I'd love to hear your comments on these suggestions.
Craig Ringer
I think the 3-click study is inherently flawed, since they studied the results of tests where people were asked to complete specific tasks; naturally they would *work harder* to complete them.
Now analyze a bunch of random people, who are not privy to the study in their everyday web habits, and see how the 3-click rule holds up.
In this context they aren't 'rules', exactly. Not rules of the net at least, they're HCI guidelines, around half of which are always wrong, and a quarter of which are painfully obvious (case in point being HCI guidelines on colours, i.e. don't use colours that clash and make it difficult to even look at the page)
;)
And naturally, there are always exceptions to the rule - sometimes there is asthetic value in making a flagrantly difficult to use website, even if there is only usability value in it if your target audience are painfully pretentious and will only use pages that are asthetically interesting..
So they aren't rules, they're more like, guidelines
fortune -o
With most browsers, if you "Save as" an HTML page the browser will make local copies of all images/stylesheets/etc linked in the document and link to these local copies instead of those on real server. You can also accomplish something similar with wget. I prefer this to PDF versions for archival, HTML files are much easier to manipulate. Personnaly, I'm annoyed when I'm looking for some information an it's only available as PDF.
So this guy Porter gives users tasks to complete, and counts how many clicks it takes them. He then generalizes that to "Its ok to have high click counts." That may be true, if the task is "Find the syntax of a configuration variable on this router I just bought." It's much less likely to be true if the task is "pick between these 5 routers for sale." :)
In the second case, the user is "likely" to spend three clicks per site. Porter fails to explain his tasks, the motivations given to the users, or the alternatives. Bad experiment designs lead to bad conclusions. Not explaining your experiment design is bad experiment design.
In conclusion, please take my experimental design class.
Layout is also important yes. The navigation should be on of the first things rendered. A user should be looking at their navigation options before the page is finished loading. This is often times not the case.
Another way to solve it is to have a flat website with a large number of very specific links that go to once place only, but of course laying that out is problematic.
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
IMO those "rules" aren't debunked. Anyway, they're guidelines, remember?
...
In a lot of areas and situations, they apply. But clearly it's idiotic to make a news website with only 7 links. OTOH it's counterproductive to put every conceiveable category on the first page. So in the end, the rule - ahem, guideline - still applies, sort of.
And the 3 clicks rule is a very very good one, but it stems from interfaces that were limited in scope. Still, the rule (ok, guideline) applies most of the time.
If I click on a news article link, I don't want to first go to a page to choose a preferred layout, for example. That's one of the stupid mistakes we nowadays won't see anymore. If I want to print the page, I'll see a print button on most news pages, and that's the way to do it.
Still, if I go for something specific and lots of deciding parameters have to be resolved first, I'll most likely be taken through a process of refining options before I reach my destination. Even there, if by the third click I don't have firm feedback that in the end I'll get there, I'm gone. So the rule - yeah yeah guideline - still applies, sort of.
The reason these guidelines can't be 'debunked' is because they stem from the limits of our cognitive capabilities. So in most situations, they work perfectly, and even on a page with hundreds of links, it really really helps if those links are categorised and ordered in groups of say 7 links
Only shortsighted people however, will try to apply a limited set of rules, guidelines or holy dictates to every instant of reality.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
For example, many transit agencies take shortcuts on publishing their schedules by just making PDFs of their schedules available, which makes it impossible to view from a Pocket PC, WAP gateway, or a public kiosk that might not have a pdf viewer installed. The worse offenders just scan their printed schedules and publish in PDF as a bitmap. :(
But these rules were created before many advances were made.
For instance, you aren't likely to find everything you want at an online store in three clicks. If you are looking for jewelry or specialty blank CD media, you may get to your category in three clicks, but there are still a dozen clicks beyond that to see the full contents of the category.
I would be interested in seeing what kind of tasks users were asked to perform and rate their "three-clickability" (terrible term). Almost anything involving a store, inventory, or selection process voids that "rule" for the end result, but not for the category.
Perhaps it should be rephrased that the user should be able to get to any content-space in three clicks instead of a page.
Pricewatch gets you to content in two clicks.
Outpost has three clicks to content on the sections I checked - one click, really - two for refining.
ice.com has one click to content, and then two for refining.
Barnes & Noble has three clicks to content.
Even eBay has three clicks to content.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
I find that annoying because, assuming I'm interested, the first thing I end up doing is printing the HTML page to a PDF file so I can archive it.
This I can't believe. How can a PDF ever be better than HTML for digital archiving? HTML was meant to be read on computer; PDF is intended to be printed out.
Unless you really meant "ugly HTML" instead of merely "HTML". Stupid web pages with colorful toolbars, formatting, background pics, tables-for-layour, ad banners, 'related content' links and 'click here for page 3/21' on the bottom... they're a tough way to read documents, and I suppose a PDF could be an improvement.
But the best way for publishers to present documentation is as simple, usable HTML. Then, if the reader wants a PDF, she can print it herself, and it'll take whatever font and pagination she prefers. (PDFs created by publishers are greatly flawed in that the layout is frozen, instead of being dependent on the qualities of the output device. If I'm reading on a computer, there should be no page breaks.)
The number of clicks that it takes for me to get frustrated and quit depends on several factors. One of them is how busy I am at the time. Another is how slow the site loads up (for example it might be way too slow on my dialup access if it has a lot of images). Now if I am over at the university playing volunteer for some research being done, I'm sure I won't be very busy and will get some great download speeds on the campus gigabit network, so I'd say that there I'd probably be able to do 2 or 3 clicks a second and not be frustrated with a bad search until maybe around 100 clicks. But back home on my slow dialup (no DSL/cable out here in the boonies), I'm quite likely to get frustrated after just 3 clicks, or maybe even fewer in some cases.
So has that research been tainted by factors affected by doing the research?
I saw a TV segment several years ago where some group was doing a test. They were examining things like pop-up ads. They used hidden cameras in some people's homes (presumably with someone else's permission) which showed some people who get very frustrated, and even angry, when ads pop up in place of what they wanted to get. They compared it to people undergoing similar tests in an academic setting where there was essentially no level of frustration. I think either the sample was selected wrong (e.g. only people who don't get frustrated are willing to go to a campus and be studied), or the study was influenced (the calm campus testing area environment, without the kids screaming in the other room).
But ... that said ... I think the curve that shows 50% get frustrated after 9 clicks to probably not be too far off. The question is, do you want to alienate 50% of the people by using a 9 click policy, or just 10% with a 5 click policy?
The study does point out a good issue. It doesn't matter if you can get to every piece of information in as few as 3 clicks, if the site is so badly organized and presented that people can't figure out that shortest path quickly as they take it. If they get misled and go down the wrong path, your 4 level web tree does no good.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Evey web site is different, how can some dip shats assume rules can be be uniform for everyone? What about web sites that act as applications such as a complex financial quotation/charting page? Would such a site have to be crippled to conform to some stupid set of rules? Idiots!
This is a really cool site. I like the little graphics next to the guidelines that show how well each suggestion is supported by research, and the graphical examples they show of most concepts.
This is a really great site for most people making a website. Of course professional web designers would not care about these suggestions, but they have the skill and experience to pull off the the more complex sites. Reminds me of this quote...
"Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid."
- Jules Feiffer
The first thing that came to mind seeing the page of new rules is "Quit all that damned capitalization!" How can I see if two sentences placed under each other aren't the same link? I see loads of text, but I can't see how many are actually separate links.
To me, that page is even not worthy of clicking through.
home
That's why it's a good idea reuse the same graphics as much as possible on many pages of a web site, e.g., place a banner that identifies your company at the top of each page. Modem users will already have the graphics in their cache, and won't have to wait for them to load again.
What really frustrates me is sites like Apple's, where you can't even tell what's on the page or how to navigate it until you wait for a megabyte of jpegs to load. Thirty three-second clicks is heaven. Three thirty-second clicks is hell.
Find free books.
There are actually good reasons to both of those rules, and the 7+-2 article did a better job of mentioning these than the 3-click article did.
The research that the 7+-2 rule is based on has to do with short-term memory, not how many people can read through. The point of this rule is that if people are "browsing" when they come to the site, meaning that they are not sure what they are looking for, they have to look through all the options and choose one. If there are more options than they can store in short-term memory, they have to do multiple browses to find what they want. As an example, if the site has 20 links, and the most appropriate link is link #10, the person needs to browse the whole list once, ask themself if any of those were appropriate (which they may or may not remember), then rebrowse from the top for that choice, or start over. Since they might not remember even seeing an appropriate one, they may have to do this multiple times to move more of the list into long-term memory so they can analyze it better, or just make a choice that doesn't take into account all the options. If the list had been 7+-2 in length, they could have made that determination in their short-term memory much more quickly.
If, on the other hand, every user coming to your site knows what they are looking for and where it is, they can look through 100 or more links to find it and as soon as they see it, they will click on it. They are not browsing, but searching for a specific thing.
The 3-click rule is almost related to the above, and it involves browsing vs. searching. If a browser makes a choice at the top they feel is appropriate (again not sure if they're in the right spot), if they don't find what they're looking for in 3-clicks they probably determined they chose incorrectly initially and will back up and start again. If they have definite progress towards their destination, they will go dozens of links deep to find it.
A searcher who knows what they are looking for is more confident about their initial choice and will keep digging to find it. The 3-click rule doesn't really apply to them.
The 3-click rule is much more of a guideline, and should really be that they need to see progress to their goal after 3 clicks or they'll turn back. It was also created because you must have created a mess if someone has to dig through 25 steps to find what they're looking for; I would call that failed site design even if people were willing to go that far. The article referenced was generally pretty poor as far as a study goes, they didn't give any information about what these people were doing, if they knew what they were looking for, etc. It doesn't really prove anything, and certainly doesn't "debunk" the guideline, which is pretty much based on common sense.
On their own ranking scale:
...they score an average of exactly 2.5 on their support. I'm not impressed.
.05 (accepting a 5% chance any given result is a false positive), they have a cumulative probability of 93% that at least one of their "4" scores is incorrect.
"How the Scale Is Defined
Score Meaning of the number of bullets
5 bullets -- Two or more Category A Experiments (Hypothesis Testing) support the guideline.
4 bullets -- One Category A Experiment (Hypothesis Testing) supports the guideline.
3 bullets* -- Two or more Category B Studies (Observational Evaluation/ Performance-Based Usability Tests) support the guideline.
2 bullets* -- One Category B Study (Observational Evaluation/ Performance-Based Usability Tests) supports the guideline.
1 bullet* -- One or more Category C Observations (Expert/Opinions), and no other supporting evidence, supports the guideline.
0 bullets** -- No evidence supports the guideline. The guideline may be routinely implemented in many Web sites as standard practice without any supporting evidence."
Furthermore, they have zero scores of 5; not a one of their "experiments" was replicated. And they have 14 scores of 4. If success were considered the traditional statistical significance value of p
Finally, out of 150 measures, they have 11 scores of "1", meaning "expert opinion". Without a way to tell whether these opinions might be biased by something like potential gain from a commercial publication on the subject, these would be all useless. However, they do provide such evidence. Many of these "opinions" are from published books, for which the author no doubt gets paid. While the author may indeed be an expert, and his/her opinion very probably good and correct, these data are potentially biased to the point that they are NOT EVIDENCE.
This sort of nonsense is what Samuel Clemens was talking about when he said "Lies, damn lies, and statistics".
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Apparently he can't deal with the idea of a document that isn't contained within a single file. That's about the only archival advantage PDF has over HTML. Personally, I prefer the HTML.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
He is a filthy karma whore. Worse than Hanzo-san.
I originally read "Three Chick Rule", so I suppose that's a rule for porn sites.
HTML pages save to disk too. They just don't come out as a single file.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
These are not rules, these are guidelines. Even the link that /. included in the article description is
http://usability.gov/guidelines/index.html
There is a big differene between a rule and a guideline. The web-site is from the National Cancer Institute and it appears they wanted to share some lessons learned with the community. I for one appreciate that they took the time to formalize their findings on how to make the web easier to navigate. Unlike some rules, there is an address provided if you feel they have missed something. See their about page: http://usability.gov/guidelines/about.html
Every homepage should have a [google] search box.
Corollary: A single page should not have more links than the search results from google.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Sorry to burst your bubble, but `' are also called quotation marks. At least in the US. Dunno about other places. Probably are there to, considering most other countries use `' for speech.
Also, this strengthens the point your parent was making; some people make the distinction between single and double quotation marks as between sort of tongue-in-cheekish use and quoting someone.
While the article sets out to debunk the web-design standard of the "3-click rule," the real object lesson here is an understanding of how the websites they examine succeed in breaking the latent frustration of visitors. Site "stickiness," keeping users clicking and exploiting links to content, must work against the natural human proclivities for exhaustion of novelty and short attention spans. It is certainly true, as was noted in the article, that years of exposure to an ever-increasing flood of information have increased our thresholds for sifting through data. Still, what really keeps someone coming back for more is a successful application of the reward principle. This shouldn't come as any suprise, game designers have plied this for years. Now, in the case of websites, we see a similar application of this principle. People will move through a task, even if it requires many multiples of 3-clicks, if this history of exploring navigational structures has shown they are moving towards a successful completition.
Most likely, the real truth here is that the 3-click rule evolved out of an era where the 'ergonomics' of human-web internation were poorly understand, providing a quick and easy rule of thumb where content designers could easily throw up pages while still retaining visitors.
In the end, though, one shouldn't come away from these articles with the notion that users will suffer any number of clicking injustices. It does show, however, that there is no substitute for a well-organized site that recognizes the processes by which a visitor will make use of the content.
What's next? Murphy's law is not a law?
avoid using graphics on search pages
:)
well it doesn't seem to hurt google much
'IMAGE' is not an element in HTML 4 (check for yourself). Maybe it should be. Maybe it should stand for inline, base64 encoded images. But it doesn't.
Makes you wonder when the submitter of the article last wrote a page of HTML...
There are rules, evolutionary ones, bad design gets ignored.
Yes they do. It's called MHT. IE does it. If you ask them, they'll claim it's "microsoft html format", but it actually stands for "MIME HTML" (all the pages, images, etc, are encoded as MIME and embedded in a plaintext file).
funny munging
The number of choices that a person can retain in his memory (5-9 according to the cited study) is an important consideration when navigating a web site using a text-to-speech device.
that you should
- preferably work on a fixed price basis
- make *one* good functional design on which both parties agree
- put everything in a very strictly formulated contract
they want more? slap them over the head with the contract and make them pay for it!
of course, few companies/free lance designers do this in practice, hence the horror stories presented on the aforementioned page. and hence the crazy working hours for programmers to just fix that 'little bit' extra.
in the end, following this strategy will give you a professional image from the customers' point of view (they know what they are doing), and less stress in the development process. the overhead of making a good functional design is more than worth it.
Of course, between IE, Opera, and Mozilla the only one that apparently can save as MHT is IE. So that option is out.
Three clicks, that's so 90's, nowadays we use 1-click.
Martin
"PDFs created by publishers are greatly flawed in that the layout is frozen, instead of being dependent on the qualities of the output device. If I'm reading on a computer, there should be no page breaks."
It depends on your purpose. If I'm printing some reference material (for instance, the make manual; ignore the fact that there is probably a more suitable for printing PDF version available directly from GNU), I would print it to PDF first. Why? So I can see how it will look. A lot of archival things I want to look as much like the original as possible. If I'm reading the report on the Columbia disaster, I want to read it in PDF so I can see how it was organized in print. I don't want to read the HTML version (like what NASA has for the Challenger's Rogers Report).
Now, of course there are a lot of things for which PDF is unsuited, but there are many many cases where it is very helpful.
Please explain slashdot...
The 3-click rule is actually based on a little math, and doesn't just come from nowhere. The question is this: given a finite number of leaves (end destinations), how should a menu be arranged to minimize the average amount of time required to access any leaf? The assumptions are that each 'menu' (level of the tree) takes the same amount of time to read/load/listen to, and that each final menu choice is equi-probable. Under these conditions, continuous optimization shows that a tree with exp(1) = 2.718... branches per node is optimal. Thus, the choice of 3 options per menu level is usually chosen.
Again, this rule is based on some fairly strict assumptions, and realistically, an optimal menu layout (in terms of minimizing clicks) may conflict with a logical menu layout (in terms of hierarchichal ordering).
I've never understood this. Why not praise someone who posts useful information?
By definition there are 72 points in an inch. If you set a 10 point font it should be just more than 1/7th of an inch (5/36th if you care), no matter how many dpi your screen has Fix your local settings.
I agree though that a font size (10 point or other) should never be specified. Old people need bigger fonts.
P.S. Yes I'm aware that most computers do not allow you to set your screen dpi, so you can't in practice do this. Doesn't change the fact that things are broken on your end.
It's not the "government". It's the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Says so at the bottom of the Usability Guidelines page. If you aren't doing research on cancer using U.S. government money, they don't have any authority over you. So, relax, everyone.
Here's another one:
If your website is large, have a fucking search box. There's nothing more frustrating than having to navigate through a huge hierarchy just to find something when you already know exactly what it is that you're looking for.
Most shopping sites have this but a lot of content sites do not. It's most irritating when you want to find a page that you've already been to or are looking for something on a University's site.
It is absolutely traceable to better GUI design. Old style cockpits were full of gauges that had to be scanned, constantly, always checking temperature gauges and a zillion things which almost always had the proper readings and did not change, scan the instruments, scan outside, scan the instruments, scan outside ... boring as hell scanning those gauges, because they were almost always showing what they should have been ... can you spell repetitive? boring?
Glass cockpits and HOTAS, Hands On Throttle And Stick, changed everything. The computer monitored instrumentation, and only showed what was out of spec, and alerted you when that happened. HOTAS meant doing everything from the two controls, stick and throttle. No more moving your hands from the primary flight controls to reach for one of dozens of toggle switches and dials which all looked the same, while pulling 5Gs and still trying to scan all those round gauges and track the situation outside and look where your fingers were.
I knew a retired air force pilot who had flown patched up MiGs collected from battlefields, who said the biggest difference between planes of the same era was that the US planes had HOTAS and glass cockpits, and the Russians still had round gauages and toggle switches. Even if the Russian got on the tail of a US fighter, he had to reach up or over while pulling Gs, trying to reach the arming and firing switches and having to do it quick with one of his hands which really should have stayed on the throttle and stick because he was in combat, but no, so he lost a bit of maneuvering while the American was doing it all with ease because his hands were on the controls that mattered and his eyes were outside the cockpit instead of scanning dozens of round gauges.
*That* is a classic GUI redesign.
Infuriate left and right
Shouldn't the subject headers on that page be done with text rather than images?
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---
I personally don't mind longer clickstreams, as long as they make sense!. What really gets me going are two things: Flash-only navigation, and pages/contents that make no sense based on your task at hand. Take Comcast's web site for example- a prime example of UI nastiness.
First off, if I don't have access to a flash-enabled browser, I can't do anything associated with my account, or locate any contact information. Even after I have access to flash, there's even more trouble. Instead of providing you a list of service contacts so that you can easily scan through and locate the one in your area, you first have to know which of five or so regions you reside in (county incorporated, county unincorporated, etc). How the hell am I supposed to know this? Who cares? I only want some help with my problem, and suddenly I've got a whole new issue to deal with.
Even worse, this is the exact same request screen that appears when you're looking to BUY service from comcast, so it almost looks like they're inter-mingling their support and sales functions- quite confusing, because you're never sure if you're on the right page. My only feedback in situations like this would be to hire a competent web designer/design firm who is well aware of UI issues, and come up with a better solution.
Don't they just mean more than 9 choices? Why don't they just call it the 9 rule, instead of the 7 +/- 2 rule? I mean obviously, when there are only 2 or 3 logical options it makes no sense and leads to increased confusion and frustration to offer users 5.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Also, in the applicaiton I work on if we were to port more of our reports to the web, we'd break these rules as we have 200 reports, that fall under about 1 main menu option and 15 submenu options, and then teh 200 reports. We'd then have to present the user with the report selection criteria, which would then have to be submitted to get to the report. Eeep! I can't see these rules being useful in large applications, but in small ones or in web news sites.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
...but it's still frustrating. How often do people come back to a site that requires 29 clicks?
--- Ban humanity.
for instance, the make manual; ignore the fact that there is probably a more suitable for printing PDF version available directly from GNU
Gnu.org would never host a newfangled non-standard* format like PDF when Postscript is perfectly able to present "as printed" data.
However, if I wanted the manual printed, I'd certainly go to the HTML, not PDF. Since I can read significantly smaller text than the average person, the PDF would use up 25 times as much paper as the HTML. (People with impaired vision would suffer the opposite problem).
If the file was only available in one format, it should be HTML, not PDF. Converting an HTML to a decent PDF is easy for an end-user, but the reverse translation is much more difficult.
(Note that to optimally print an HTML file requires smarter software than is typically used. For example, links to targets in the same file should be replaced with parenthetical page numbers)
* Adobe has a PDF specification document online, but it is incomplete. There are some PDF files Acrobat can read, but those specs don't describe. Whenever someone publishes how to read those files, Adobe has him arrested.
If you can have at most three clicks... and only seven choices at each point... then your site can hold only 7 ** 3 == 343 pages! So clearly at least one of the two rules is bogus.
Incorrect. Obviously, both rules are valid, and there exists simply the (correct) corrolary that sites with more than 343 pages are improperly desinged.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
The Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelinespage itself can hardly be called usable; I for once welcome individuality in design.
Seriously though, their navigation distracts and confuses the eye from the moment the page loads, makes finding relevant information time consuming (topics are scattered all over the page); even slashdot.org has better navigation; and I'm sure slashdot contains much more information to navigate through.
Could good guidelines add up to such a result?
Or commitetes simply aren't built to address something as personal as web viewing preferences?
Bring on the information, provide me content, organise it, tag it, and give it to me in a format I can eat; I'll lay it out by configuring my browser, thank you.
I teach my students that, but in the context of the number of major elements to have in a system. I also tell them 3-15 is the range to be in. My point is that a system should have that number of subsystems to be 1) grokable, and 2) sufficiently complex to be worth defining.
James Kalbach's article points out how poorly understood the "7 +/- 2" "rule" is in general, but he seems to ignore that since its publication in 1956 psychologists have learned quite a bit about this "limitation" on information processing abilities. His suggestions are old news on this front and, instead of debunking 7 +/- 2, confirm its importance.
Let's start off with an example from where the research was perhaps first applied -- telephone numbers (George Miller, the researcher who "discovered" this number, worked for Bell Labs). US telephone numbers, since 1947, have followed the 3-3-4 format: 3 numbers for the area code, 3 for the exchange and 4 for the line number. Add the 1 in front of any number for dialing long distance and you've got an 11-number sequence. Does this violate the 7 +/- 2 "rule"? Not really, for a number of reasons:
Given these factors, a local phone number can have a demand on your STM as little a 5 "bits" of data for a local call. Still, you might think that with auto-dial features of phones these days, does this format really matter anymore? Well, maybe not to the technology in our phones that stores the information for us, or to the telephone switching technology that accepts and routes and connects our calls, but if someone gives you a phone number to remember you'll have a much easier time of it if you at least recognize the area code, even if all you need to do is walk to the phone and dial (as opposed to memorizing it). That 3-3-4 pattern helps us cluster the data and retain it in STM longer than if we'd try to hold a ten-digit sequence without any clustering or recognizable pattern.
The point being that 7 +/- 2 is not a design "rule" that has anything to do with the underlying technology but, rather, how human brains work. Kalbach and others either have forgotten or never knew that the "7 +/- 2" pieces of info have nothing to do with what the technology can handle and everything to do with what one person can juggle in STM while trying to do something meaningful with that info.
Chunking or clustering data is something we do naturally, without conscious effort, to reduce demands on our information processing. Use of cultural conventions (like requiring the 1 for long distance) that everyone familiar with a task can learn can also reduce these demands. By reducing these demands, you can help people
They should be able to. If it's not exactly a standard, it's 100% standards-based. And if they can't, you can easily write a plugin or app to do it.
funny munging
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
I completely agree with the 3 clicks rule. Customer's credit cards should always be available within a cracker's first 3 clicks.
I use Mozilla, and you'll pry it out of my cold dead hands. But I don't use tabs, and don't see what all the fuss is about, it just adds an extra bar with its own sub windows, I'd rather just have 2-5 mozilla windows open. It appears to me that tabs simply mean I may have to move my mouse twice as far, or use two different keyboard shortcuts (or switch using both keyboard and mouse). I'd rather just alt-tab between moz windows and other apps.
The "simple" CSS Complex Spiral Demo does a good job of demonstrating some of IE's broken CSS. I also like the distorded edition too - very creative usage of CSS!
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
The "New Rules for us to follow" aren't for us (they're for the National Cancer Institute), and they're not rules. They're not even guidelines in the corporate sense (where "guideline" is a synonym for "rule."). As stated here (the bold text is from the site):
It's remarkable that each guideline has a "strength of evidence" icon showing whether the guideline has no evidence, or is based one expert opinion, or on usability tests, or on hypothesis testing. It's refreshing to see science in web design. The site is follows its own guidelines and has advice that could improve many web sites.
So, although the title of the link is inflammatory, the link itself is gold.
Who modded this Troll? Rokzy's exactly right on both counts -- mOoZik has missed the entire point, and saying that there are no rules is just a childish excuse for not taking the time to understand the medium and the work of others in the space.
The 7+/-2 rule can also be attacked by clumping. Arrange the data in blocks, create an obvious hierarchy, use multiple columns. A well organized navigation bar with 5 global destinations, along with a table of half a dozen main categories with a handful of brief sublinks, and a sidebar with four context-sensitive links... that's fine.
Similarly...
The three click rule shouldn't be based on the number of clicks spent on the site, but the number of clicks spent without making any obvious progress. If you reward the visitor with an indication that they're narrowing down the goal, and don't force them to backtrack unnecessarily, or let them backtrack easily when they have to, they'll keep resetting the "click counter".
It's not that hard to devise a site that'll do this, if you think about it. You do have to think about it, not just copy things you've seen without understanding what they meant.
For one example: A lot of sites have "breadcrumb trails". There's two kinds of these, one useful, one pointless.
If you take the "breadcrumb" analogy too literally, you track where they go and provide links back to previous pages they've been on the site. That's pointless, they already have that information in their browser's backlinks.
But if you think about how people are going to use them in combination with their browsers, then what you do is show them how they would get there from the base of the site... now the trail is a guide to related information... much more useful.
Then, add more cross references.
There's support sites I've given up on after half a dozen clicks because the search engine was the only index to the site, no connections from a document to related documents, and I could see I'd never find what I wanted following random searches. Others I've been happy to spend half an hour digging through because they were effectively cressreferenced... every link rewarded me and reset the "click counter".
Clustering, crossreferences, partial results, progress, rewards. That's how you apply these rules, and that's what you have to figure out how to measure to see if these rules are actually useful.
I will keep on clicking as long as I get what I am looking for after each click.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5........
What upsets me is when I wind up somewhere where I don't to be.
It is like a door with a sign saying 'Restroom' and on the other side their is not a toliet but a hole in the floor
into which I fall if I didn't look before stepping.
This is a test!
I find it ironic that their guideline page displays badly in safari. I didn't have any resources around to check it in other browsers, but should there even be a need? I didn't see a guideline for browser compatibility though, so maybe they just don't care about that.
... where the number of choices on each page is more like 500/+-200
I agree - W3C is where it's at.
I've just realized though that IE has a severe deficiency which is somewhat of a showstopper for the adoption of XHTML - it ignores the XML declaration in XHTML documents, like this:
IE expects to encouter the DOCTYPE first, which doesn't make sense - and would be non-valid XHTML markup. When you feed IE with this as text/html, it's throws it in to quirks mode!
Sure, the XML declaration is not strictly required, however if you read the W3C XHTML spec it says:
An XML declaration is not required in all XML documents; however XHTML document authors are strongly encouraged to use XML declarations in all their documents. Such a declaration is required when the character encoding of the document is other than the default UTF-8 or UTF-16 and no encoding was determined by a higher-level protocol. Here is an example of an XHTML document. In this example, the XML declaration is included.I know XHTML shouldn't be sent as text/html, but it's convenient in a transition and IE wouldn'y understand application/xhtml+xml anyway.
What would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
The reason site maps are useless on most sites is because if you have a web site with a good gui, it is actually mentally cheaper to click a few times and wait for pages to load, than be overwhelmed by hundreds of links at the same time.
Unfortunately, many site have such a bad GUI that I have to go to the site map to find what I'm looking for! It's unbelieveable how *bad* some sites are -- ones with big money behind them too. If they didn't have a site map (which is really a relic of the past) they'd be completely useless.
In order to have a useable site, the user must be able to identify the right next step. The user can probably evaluate 5-9 choices at once, but the user may make multiple choices (looking into smaller areas of the same page) before clicking, assuming that the user gets feedback from the text that the section is appropriate. Of course, the user can go through a long list if each item is clearly either worth trying or not worth trying.
...), because the user feels closer with each click.
After each click, the user has to get feedback that the click was correct. The second page must look more promising than the first, the third more promising than the second, and so on. Otherwise the user goes back and eventually gives up. It's pretty hard to keep your site encouraging for many clicks.
The pathological case of a site which always responds to the first click by showing an identical page, and to the second click by answering the user's question will never be used successfully, despite being only two clicks. A site which provides information on a piece of computer hardware by model number with one click per character of the model number could probably keep the user clicking for dozens of clicks (JUSTer, JUSTer Active, JUSTer Active Sx-xxx, JUSTer Active SP-xxx,
These aspects are actually best seen in games and puzzles, where the intent is that it be difficult to succeed, but it simultaneously has to keep the player from giving up. Therefore, the player has to either keep getting farther or keep feeling more skillful.
I forgot to mention that I like to write with my native language's accented characters (when writing in Danish that is) rather than having to escape them using UTF.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
In his analysis, when he goes from proposition to conclusion, he says, "Clearly...blah blah ...(unproven conclusion)". This is the classic way of punting when there
is no proof, or the proponent does not
wish to go to the effort of making one.
So when the poster uses the term "debunk,"
he overstates his case.
This air force guy had talked about his experiences flying MiGs against US forces, not in actual combat, but as evaluation of captured and bought planes. He may have had actual combat experience, I don't know, but his knowledge on this score came from evaluation, not combat. Hope I didn't mislead anybody :-)
Infuriate left and right
Would you care to back up this claim? Alhtough it's not a counter-proof I know of two groups who have implemented from-scratch PDF renderers that are yet to encounter documents using undocumented features. The PDF specification is quite large (1000+ pages) and some things are relatively obscure so it can sometimes appear that documents are doing things not in the spec.
I'm a dinosaur. I'm a damn good web coder. I used to love writing clean code. I loved the challange of reproducing what the design people came up with using the least amount of resourses.
Marketing sucked the joy out of my work. I'd tell my boss "Look, it's fast and easy to use, and it looks the same in all browsers!" and he'd say "So? It needs more animations!"
People like me are being replaced with flash monkeys and go tards with dreamweaver.People who can't write a style sheet by hand, or create simple javascripts.
And look at the results! Sites that crash my browser, sites where I can't find any real content. Who the hell thinks a serious b to b site should be loaded down with flash? Why use java for ad banners?
I doubt most non tech savy users on dial up connections are slogging through this crap.
The internet is becoming less and less useful. And we have marketing weenies to thank.
You SHOULD use the "pt" specifications but not "px". This is because any computer has already been set up such that the 10pt font is legible, by means of the large/small font settings, DPI etc. Think window menus, icon titles, etc. A font size specified in points can further be scaled by the browser (a pixel-sized font cannot).
"em" depends on the current font size which makes it a bad choice for setting a font size. Same goes for the "larger" "smaller", because they are supposed to be used in a context where you know what the previous size is, and cascading them intentionally or not, usually ends up in a mess. They are good for small, localized content but not for an entire paragraph or page.
While it may be a good idea for a small page to just leave the font size setting alone as you suggest, more complex pages almost always have to do this to control the effects mentioned above where content inserted later changes the look of the entire page unexpectedly.
It sounds like the thing you like about PDF is that you can save a local copy. But you can do that with html, too:
wget -r -l0 http://site.com/
Even easier would be if site owners would provide you with a tar file, so you can save a copy with just one click.
I dislike having to download a HUGE PDF, and then load up my PDF viewer every time I want to look at the docs. Plus, all the page breaks are annoying, as are the sized-for-print fonts.
"It sure was strange to see something on Usenet about me that didn't involve Klingon gang rape." -- Wil Wheaton
She's talking about Dimitry Sklyarov. And yes, he was arrested for describing a process that could enable a program to read encrypted PDF files to blind users. I was there. I attended his talk. He stated specifically that it was about usability, not cracking. One guy got up and stormed out because Dimitry refused to tell him how to "crack PDFs".
Dimitry was arrested the next day as he was leaving his hotel room to catch a plane home to Russia. He wasn't even an American citizen.
If you are interested, email me (bford (at) eecs (dot) wsu (dot) edu) and I will send you a recording of his talk.
These "rules" obviously only apply to static sites.
./) copes with this is to create headers, subheaders and subsections within each page. The user is really "clicking with his eyes", going from the front page to the header on the front page that talks about a subject of interest, and then on to a link going to a page.
If there should only be 3 clicks to get to any page, and max 9 links that bring you there, and each page except the front page has a link to the front page, there's a maximum of 577 pages for a site.
Obviously, this is not a good recommendation for highly dynamic sites.
Still, the principles are sound -- don't overwhelm the user with choices, and don't make it take too much work to get to the desired information.
The way most sites (including
It's all about trying not to confuse the visitor, or make the visitor go through more work than necessary. The sites that do this well get returning visitors, and on the web, there's indeed a survival of the fittest, and evolution going on -- sometimes to dead ends (like flash navigation and sideways scrolling), but overall to more sites worth using.
Regards,
--
*Art
Sinse when did the "National Cancer Institute" become a standards body? Every company I've ever worked for seems to spend more time trying to become the defacto standard for the web. How come companies feel that they need to spend so much time creating standards? It seems that the National Cancer Institute could be spending their time much more wisely if they just followed normal web practices rather than trying to come up with their own web standards.
just look at that page, there's at least fifty options right there. maybe 12 or 13 is okay, but fifty? crikey, they probably didn't follow all their rules when making that page!
*De gozaru!*
Totally right! Interesting to see the most sucessful web site driven by a text input.
One factor I didn't see in the article is bandwidth. What does a "click" mean? Normally it means navigating to (ie transferring from the server to their PC) new content. As bandwidth has increased, which includes everything from server performance and internet infrastructure to the final mile, the delay until that new content is available at the client has decreased, meaning that clicks are lest costly time-wise now.
So as the penalty of clicking on a link has reduced, the tolerance to clicking has gone up.
This should be a huge factor in the 3-click rule, which I don't remember seeing in the article.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
I know you're being funny, but this was actually exactly what I was thinking.
All these "user retention" studies seem predicated on the idea that if someone happens across your page and reacts well to it, they'll of course want to read the whole thing from end to end like a book. Honestly, who ever does that? So how much can we really infer from the number of times a user clicks on links? If they stop clicking, it could just as easily be because the page is boring, ugly, erroneous, offensive, too many pop-ups, etc.
Breakfast served all day!
Not a flame, just an observation.
You're a "Genius"
Is it me or does this report seem rather unscientific? I quote: "we looked at data from a recent study of 44 users attempting 620 tasks." But no mention of the conditions under which these tasks were set. It's obvious that variations in the experimental conditions will produce variations in the results. For example, someone trying to find a product on a particular website may be inclined to give up after 3 clicks if they know they can just click over to the Walmart site to look. On the other hand, if you say to someone "here's a task, achieve it using this website" it's likely that they will persevere a bit more. The cynic in me suggests that the main purpose of the article is to publicise their roadshow. But then, the report does have graphs. Who am I to argue with graphs?
That a single set of guidelines will satisfy all users of all sites is, imho , ludicrous. Some people like web sites with "wallpaper" or patterns; me, I hate web sites with wall paper - what is the point of having text if you cant read it.
Now it is true that a lot of companies have a std layout, at least in my industry, you get to the home page, and there are tabs for home, products, technology, contact, investors. And that std format is a bit help, esp when they follow thru on the lower layers. But this sort of std format is a lot less important then clear english.
IMHO, what matters is the clicks to get what you want. If the site can get its message across with 1 choice, per screen, great; if you need 20, ok.
But the choices/page is far less important then clear layout and a little thought; e.g., if you have, in your hand, a product and the label gives a name and a model number, why does a search of the site turn up nothing ? Or the links to documentation are not on the product page (yes, virginia, some people are stupid enough to have separate, nonlinked tech info and product trees). Untill you pass some minimal level of intelligence, it is not important to worry about design criteria for clicks/page.I have even seen company sites where u cant skip the flash intro (true !)
Your point is well taken, but shouldn't be a blanket rule, because with all good rules, there are many necessary exceptions. Anyway, the real place to solve the font units issue is in the browser, not in the design. Covering up for browser defects in design may be necessary on occasion, but it is also shortsighted design.
Several browsers (Apple's Safari comes to mind) allow users to enlarge or reduce all the fonts on a page with one click, regardless of whether the designer set sizes in fixed or relative units. While Safari's behavior goes against what the W3C intended, there are a few reasons why the W3C is not being realistic with their guidelines for font units.
It is entirely realistic to set "main content text" using relative font sizes and user default fonts, and to make the width of the "main content area" proportional to the width of the window rather than fixed. However, navigation text and auxiliary text are often better rendered in fixed-width or fixed-height boxes, in which case fixed font units are more appropriate because they address a variety of other issues arising from variable window sizes and variable width of the main content area. Setting font sizes in pixels may also be helpful in aligning text with background textures.
Thus, the W3C expectations will be fine if/when everyone views the web on phones or PDAs or 50-inch plasma monitors, but while more than 80% of web users are using normal PCs, it doesn't make any sense at all to deny 80% of users an optimal user experience simply because the designer hasn't taken the time to support alternate stylesheets or dynamic font management for users who prefer substandard browsers or larger/smaller font sizes. It is just as evil to deny the 80% a well-optimized experience as it is to ignore the needs of the 20%.
If you do choose to employ fixed font units, provide links to browsers that allow them to be enlarged. Better yet, provide a JavaScript font magnifier (like the Disgronifier) or alternate stylesheet for browsers that don't provide magnification of all fonts regardless of units.
In my humble opinion, it's not how many clicks it takes for the user to get to the content they're seeking - it's how easy each click it.
No matter if it's 3, 7 or 10 clicks - if the user finds the content in a logical path without getting confused, then the UI has done its jorb.
I, on the other hand, hate PDF files. I would much rather have the same info in HTML files. And I can't imagine why you feel you can archive PDF but you can't archive HTML.
because the pilot can hold Playboy in one hand and play with his personal stick with his other hand.
Oh yes, I'm sure they're shaking in their boots Sir Crapsalot.
You mean the burned placed weren't repaired properly?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
2. On the browsers I use (IE and Mozilla) PDFs only display after all data has been downloaded. This slows down reading the first few lines of info, often by several minutes.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Maybe you need another qualifying rule,
4. have content people actually want
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
That's when you start using a database to index your pages, keeping each page just 2 clicks away - enter search term on home page, click result.
;-)
The whole point of these "rules" is to *encourage* good UI design.
Doesn't mean you have to stick with them rigidly. If you have a deep index structure that could take 10 clicks to navigate (Yahoo! anyone), that's fine. But you can also search for the category and get there in two/three clicks.
But at least being aware of good UI design - even if you don't use the rules in every instance - will make you a better UI designer.
cLive
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
MHT is not HTML. It may contain HTML, but unless it can be rendered with a standard HTML engine, it's essentially just another archive format. Might as well say ZIP is a single-file HTML format too, if you're just talking about stuff you can open in MSIE. Since the Windows file browser can treat a ZIP archive as a directory, opening it on the fly , an HTML doc therein is accessable.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
But, to me, the Government website was a mess... WAY too many headings on the one page for my liking... why couldn't they have the headings on one page which linked through to the sub headings? Or, to keep it in one page, click on the heading to expand out the sub headings?
Reducing the number of clicks to get somewhere just to reduce the number of clicks is ridiculous when the tradeoff is an actually harder to immediately grab site.
What's wrong with Print Preview?
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
Wow - they really missed the boat on this one.
Imagine if it took 15 clicks every time you visited Slashdot to read what you wanted.
Given two sites - one that takes 15 clicks to get to the info you want - and one that takes 3 - which would you choose?
Have we really seen *too many* easy to navigate sites?
Long live the Three Click Rule !
No, the "rules" not there to help the webdesigner. They are a best practice to allow the USER of your site
I think your point was implied in the parent post. What exactly are you disagreeing with?
The rules are intended to help the webmaster, because the webmaster is building the website. These are rules to follow while building websites, right?
Yes, every website is built with a primary goal of serving users, as books are written for readers. The user has no direct use for these rules, though of course when the rules help the webmaster achieve his goals, the user benefits (as does the webmaster, who succeeds in bringing in more traffic/sales/etc.).
As your post and the parent post suggested, the important thing here is to understand how these rules can help you (as a webmaster) achieve your goal of building the most useful and accessible website possible. Once you understand what they offer and how what you do affects your users, you can bend the rules.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
"PDFs, like HTMLs (only worse), are bandwidth hogs."
PDFs, like HTMLs, don't have to be bandwidth hogs.
Some of the simple PDF generators produce pretty tight files with little overhead. However, it seems that the more advanced ones generate massively more bloat for only fractional improvement in appearance.
K.I.S.S., every time, thank you.
YAW.
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
Ideally, all pages of a website should be accessible from one menu system (I realize that this is impossible for really large sites) and that menu system should exist on every page of the site, enabling users to drill down or up to sub, sub-sub, sub-sub-sub, etc. site levels from any page.
Milonic's DHTML menu system does this quite nicely. There are other examples out there, I only use this one because I am quite familiar with it.
Indeed. Unfortunately, most OSes out there treat '1pt' as a certain number of pixels, instead of trying to make sure that 1pt is the right size. Some can be told the resolution of the output device, and will scale the measure appropriately - but most current OSes either don't support higher-dpi displays properly or must be manually configured to support them. As a result, the use of 'pt' in web design isn't really practical, and won't be until OS designers pull out their thumbs.
I suspect that MacOS X may get measures like 'pt' right. Most XFree86 systems attached to a _modern_ video card and monitor, if the monitor correctly reports it's physical dimensions using DDC, will get it partly right. I don't know about WinXP, but win2k/98/etc don't appear to correctly support high-res displays (at least in the interface or IE), nor does MacOS 7/8/9. That's far too many people.
My personal system (Linux/XFree86) behaves partly as you describe - at higher resolutions, type isn't smaller, just smoother and more detailed. The rest of the UI is just smaller, however, due to limitations in the current rendering system. It would be possible to do this under Windows, but increasing the font sizes globally tends to mangle a lot of apps UIs, as they assume for layout purposes that '12pt=16px' or whatever. I believe MacOS X may scale all UI elements properly, but I've only used it briefly so I can't really remember. Cairo, a new display-PostScript-like based rendering system for XFree86, should make this possible under *NIX. Maybe Longhorn will do it for Windows, but you can't expect that to be deployed widely for a while.
Because of these issues, I suggest simply avoiding the use of the 'pt' measure in web design (I use it in media-specific stylesheets for print, but never for general display). Yeah, I know it's a broken client problem - but practicality must take precedence here.
then it's probably not ever going to get set on 90% of the systems out there. Alas.
Also, setting type to (say) 4mm doesn't help people with visual problems. You're forcing them to lie to their OS about their screen dpi or override your font settings in their client just to get readable text. Relative measures respect the user's preferences, and are more compatable.
Craig Ringer
The energy of the flying bullet must equal the energy of the rifle as it recoils, right?
.50 BMG, body armor is pretty much irrelevant.
Ignoring things like air resistance, surface area, and the "oh my god I just got shot" factor, the person being shot should barely stagger.
For anecdotal evidence, I seem to remember the video of a couple of heavily armored bank robbers in Los Angeles getting shot. You could see the puffs of dust from the bullets bouncing off of their leg armor and they were barely stumbling. Now, this was probably just pistol rounds, but still! If you want to move up to the
I could be way off base, but a person might be bowled over by pain, fear, and shock, but not by the kinetic energy of the bullet.
And before some knucklehead asks, no, I don't wanna prove it!
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
It is because of foolish articles like this that I rarely, if ever, read /. with any frequency. I have been a very active professional webdesigner for the last 10 years and yet as much commitment I have to webdesign, this article means jack. Is there any news here? No. Give me some "rules" that you seem to think are set, and I'll shift your paradigm quicker than a you can blink and find your reaffirming wall-hangings that supplement your lackluster existence. There is a damn good reason for articles to be reviewed before they are posted on the /.home page, to block idiotic crap like this.
// TRiPTMiND \\
If you recall an earlier discussion here about ternary computing (base 3 instead of base 2) there is a scientific proof that the optimal balance between width-oriented menus (lots of choices at each level, decreasing the number of levels) and depth-oriented menus (few choices at each level, deeper levels) is to have e (~2.7) choices. Obviously you can't have .7 choices, but if the number of choices per level averages to e and you group your choices logically, you'll have a solid argument that your layout is optimal.
1. A PDF is in many ways, more appropriate for many forms of documentation that are based on printed material. Theoretically, someone has given enough consideration to layout and information design for the printed version that production of an HTML version of the same document is irrelevant. Reality frequently fails to meet theory, but nonetheless, layout really does matter.
2. For many sources, dual production, especially for documents whose nature is essentially fixed (trade brochures, marketing materials, etc.), is a waste of time. The end user loses little or nothing since PDF is almost as ubiquitous as HTML.
3. For many sources, PDF better meets the needs of providing both information and marketing to the audience. Cry as much as you like over the commercial nature of the internet, it's here and it's going to stay.
4. PDF preserves the original intent of the designer as to the layout of information published for what is still very much a print-based world, while at the same time providing enough utility in an electronic world to be usable (not in the sense of accessibility), but still usable.
It's an imperfect compromise between information suppliers and information consumers, but there are few, if any, perfect compromises, considering the multitude of output devices currently extant.
----
I defend the PDF format because production of certain types of documents in that format, requiring some specialized tools not readily usable by the average person due to either complexity or time factors, occasionally pays for the occasional meal or rent. It's all about the money, man. It's all about the money.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
and yeah, Xinerama is an issue. I hadn't noticed any dpi overrides though - at least with GDM2 or the KDM from KDE3.1, plus a modern (4.3) XFree86 the dpi seems to be maintained as one would expect.
:-( and there are too many stupid programmers out there.
I find it's generally pretty good about grabbing the physical dimensions from the monitor using DDC, so on good quality monitors and video cards XFree86 should just figure it out.
Alas, this is not true in many hardware combinations, older versions of Xservers, or other OSes.
And yeah - windows does break horribly when one tweaks the DPI. Especially since it's apparently incapable of fetching it from the hardware
I think the varying fonts, toolkits, themes and configuratons you find on Linux are a major advantage there - apps must be able to work well with a wide variety of fonts and sizes. As a result, one of the staff at work who is partly blind really likes her LTSP box - I've set the fonts to "bloody massive" (something like 5x size) and it's still quite useable. Windows broke down horribly above 125%.
The original source for the "three-click rule" is Catledge and Pitkow's 1995 paper, Characterizing Browsing Strategies in the World Wide Web.; see an online copy.
To quote: Directions for Design Since users accessed on average 10 pages per server, this would indicate that "must see" information must be accessible within two to three jumps of the initial home page (two/three navigations in, two/three out, performed three/two times). However, [...]
This paper is one of the first, if not the very first, actual user survey studies on the Web. It is very limited in scope, of course, and there may be good arguments to question its validity, but if you're going to do that, at least quote the rule correctly, mention its origins, and mention the fact that it was co-written by James Pitkow, who has continuing this line of research until the present day.
I went to these guidelines, looked at the first page as I was going to browse them. Went to go to the next page...No Next-> The navigation page needs :-
Include Previous and Next links to facilitate browsing between sections. We have deliberately left them off this site to demonstate how inconvenient their absence is.
Imagine if IBM chose the Z80 for the pc.
A little research report: PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption .
The UI on Comcast's DIGITAL CABLE! settop boxes is so user hating I can't imagine how any customer puts up with it.
It takes major contortions to set up favorite channels. You can't even hide the ones you don't get. Once you do set it them can you show only the favorites? Of course, not. Just shut up memorize the channel numbers.
And you just know that customers demanded that the on-screen guide have three ad windows on it so the name of the show is shown as "Ever...Ray" Right?
I've proudly wised up every friend who's been a Comcast victim to switch to DirecTiVo heaven.
So you are saying that Amazon, like it or not the most popular ecommerce site, is improperly designed?
To be honest, I was being facetious.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009