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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."
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 ./
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.
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 ...
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
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.
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.
> 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?
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 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
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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
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.
'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.
"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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Maybe you need another qualifying rule,
4. have content people actually want
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
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.
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.
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.