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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."
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)
But maybe I am just old...
Actually, that was my headline, not theirs. It should have been UI, you're right. I submitted to the pressures of Marketing. I thought the term Web would have more pull, and that would make up for it's inaccuracy.
And it might have worked! You read it well enough to know that it wasn't quite accurate!
S
/usr/bin/grep -i -E meaning life.txt
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.
Although it is true that Millers' rule applies to memorizing objects and not perceiving them there is a link between the two.
;)
Perception gets a lot harder when there are more than 7+/-2 relevant objects. If you want to test this for yourself, have someone throw a couple of pencils or similar objects on the ground and coun them. You will be able to count them in a glance if there are few objects but at some number (and for most people, that's around 7) it suddenly gets a lot harder as you'll have to count them one by one. (If this point is sowehere in the thousands you must be an autist, bu that's a different story
This does not mean you should never offer more than this number of chances because the perceptual penalty incurred by trying to squeeze the information to be presented in this format might be a lot larger than the penalty of a menu with more than 7+/-2 options.
Clustering similar information is a good start and basically uses the same principle.
Please cite a reference for this claim. Counting at a glance is called subitizing, and the last research summaries I read on this show that the inflexion point for humans is about 3, not 7. That is, you can count 1 to 3 items at a glance, but 4 and above take noticeably more time, and increase roughly linearly from there.
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 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).
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.
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
Just for completeness: Your math is wrong.
With 3 clicks you have 4 levels. The first (which you see without clicks), and the three following. The maximum number of pages you can have, given that there are no cross-links is:
level 1: 1 page, links to 7 pages of level 2
level 2: 7 pages, links to 7*7=49 pages of level 3
level 3: 49 pages, links to 49*7=7^3=343 pages of level 4:
level 4: 343 pages, no links (3 clicks reached).
sum: 400 pages.
So your calculation was only for the 4th level alone.
Another side-note: Since the rule states 7+-2, you are allowed 9 links at most and so the overall maximum is: 1+9+81+729=820 pages.
Keep an eye on which arguments are silently dropped in replies. Not always, but often times it's very telling.
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!*
scripsit phrostie:
You're quite right, but probably not for the reason you think. If you have to provide a large number of options, CLI is the best way to do it. That's why so many geeks that bothered to learn to use a shell still launch applications from xterms; it's more efficient than wading through menus. That's also why Google doesn't offer you a menu of the Internet, or a list of icons for all the world's Web sites. You type your command, just like you would at a shell prompt.
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.
How new do you think interrupts and DMA really are?
My Atari ST had both in 1986 and they weren't new concepts then in the world of computers larger than a desktop machine.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
I'll be nice and assume you're not trolling. The 7+-2 rule states that the average person can be assumed to hold 7 things in short-term memory at a time. That figure varies between individuals by up to 2, so some people can only hold 5 things; some can hold 9 things; the "-" is not a "minus", it's a range; maybe "5..9" would help, or even "5..7..9"
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
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.