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."

Comments

Different times.

[liveD ehT]

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.

Re:Different times.

[Hoplite3]

It is not different times. It is not smarter or better trained users.

Bah. C'mon. The nintendo generation is better at reading lots of information at once than their parents. Case in point: fighter planes. In Vietnam, pilots would turn off their SAM warning squawk-boxes because of information overload. The noisy box would begin to ping and the pilots would melt-down from watching too many gauges. Nowdays, our pilots process much much more information. Sure, some of this increased capacity comes from a proper layout of the cockpit, but much of it comes from training recieved from two Italian plummers and buttons A and B.

In exchange for shorter attention spans, we've gained the ability to process lots of information quickly.

Re:Different times.

[Ed Avis]

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.

Am not sure 3-click rule was really *debunked*

[ediron2]

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.

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 /. 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.

bandwidth, not clicks

[bcrowell]

It's not the clicks, it's the bandwidth. I was just paging through the Sunday NY Times Magazine, and I probably did fifty page turns, which is the dead-trees equivalent of fifty clicks. I didn't feel frustrated at all, because after I flipped the page, I didn't have to wait 20 seconds for the graphics to load.

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.

Dr. Dobb's article just plain wrong

[finelinebob]

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:

1. First and foremost, this "rule" is a description of a limitation of our short term memory's (STM) ability to hold data. What constitutes a datum, however, can be quite flexible.
2. Forget about the 1 for long distance. We all know it needs to be there. It's a true rule -- to the point that most (if not all) cell phones do not even require you to punch it in, they'll dial it for you when needed. So, in some cases, procedures related to the information you are trying to remember can reduce the demands on STM's processing, and in others the demands can be off-loaded onto technology devices that can assist our processing of the information.
3. Area codes reduce the load of 3 digits to 1. You've probably got quite a few area codes stored in your long term memory (LTM). Even if you can't recall them all off the top of your head, you can recognize familiar ones amd may even place them geographically without much trouble once you see them again. These familiar area codes allow you to "store" these 3 digits in STM as 1 datum.
4. Exchanges, before faxes and cell phones and modems created the explosion in demand on phone numbers, used to mean a lot more than they do now. They were originally linked to telephone switching equipment and had names identifying them. Growing up, my home phone number wasn't 582-xxxx but LUzon 2-xxxx. The first two letters of the exchange name corresponded with the digits. So, like area codes, exchanges reduced the demand from 3 digits to 2 and possibly even one -- back when I was 10, there was a LU 1 and LU 2 in my area, but nothing else.

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