SIGIA-L Mail Archives: RE: SIGIA-L: Need for expertise (Rule of
RE: SIGIA-L: Need for expertise (Rule of 7)
From: Eric Reiss (elr_at_e-reiss.com)
Date: Wed Mar 28 2001 - 16:25:20 EST
Just to add my two cents to this discussion of menu length, the
theory of seven, plus or minus two, was promoted by multimedia
developers back in the late eighties who were eager to give their
best-guess practices some quasi-scientific justification. I have to
confess, I was one of the guilty parties back then. Unfortunately,
several standard reference books (including Lou and Peter’s otherwise
outstanding work) have helped keep this silly myth alive.
As both Kayla and Robert have pointed out, George Miller’s original
work dealt with our ability to retain information in our short-term
memory - which is NOT the case when dealing with website menus - or
any other written list for that matter. In fact, Dr. Miller himself
(now at Princeton) points out that we are all perfectly capable of
differentiating between any of several thousand words.
For practical reasons, most top level menus are limited to five-nine
links, but for completely different reasons: the upper-most menu
helps visitors understand the overall SCOPE of the site so that they
can get their bearings and plan the best way to carry out their task.
It’s important to note that the individual labels will probably not
be particularly homogeneous in character (Products, About the
company, Contact, etc.) so keeping the list short makes it easier to
scan. Also, the longer the opening menu, the greater the chance that
the IA will have to get more specific about the content than he or
she really wants to at this point. Often, inexperienced IAs choose a
lengthy (broad) opening menu only to find that many sections are
included merely for the sake of completeness - to round out the
field, so to speak. This is where the amateurs get into trouble and
start posting under-construction signs, since there may not be
sufficient content to justify these top-tier sections. Finally, if
the opening menu is too broad, it’s virtually impossible to create a
depth-segmented site since many visitors will end up pogo-sticking
along the first tier when you really want them to drill down a level
or two.
I realize, though, that there are lots of sites that have
considerably more links on the opening page. Successful newsletter
type sites like CNN, for example, can have 60-70 links on a page
without causing confusion. However, these are invariably grouped in a
considerably smaller number of speccific sections (Weather, Sports,
Politics, etc.). The main idea is to cut a click or two out of the
navigational process by avoiding menus that merely lead to new menus
and to improve menu scanability by grouping like kinds. On the other
hand, Yahoo causes all kinds of confusion by combining odd labels
such as George Foreman and Free Shipping under the common heading
Features. Six different shopping links doesn’t help matters
either...but I digress.
Lower levels often have many more menu items since information
generally becomes more homogeneous as the user drills down through a
hierarchy - a list of digital cameras, a list of fruit, a list of
articles related to one particular subject. Just think, none of us
gets particularly hot and bothered if a page in our address book has
more than seven listings for people whose names begin with the letter
A. Invariably, lower level menus LIMIT the scope of the site by
sending out a strong signal “if it isn’t on this list, you won’t find
it on this site.”
If you’ll pardon some blatant self-promotion, my own book, Practical
Information Architecture (Addison-Wesley, 2000) contains a more
detailed review of the issues mentioned above in Chapter 8. Kayla,
you might also want to look at Chapter 2 to find out why goal setting
is so important.
Best regards,
Eric L. Reiss
Principal
e-reiss aps
copenhagen, denmark
www.e-reiss.com
(+45) 20 12 88 44
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