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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."
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 "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
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.
I just fired this off to the admins of the site:
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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
It is true that Google replaced Yahoo as THE search engine.
It could well have succeded because it lacks all that crap on the front page.
Browse at -1, because trolls are often the most creative part of
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.
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