Christina said: > I was just readign this great article > http://www.internettg.org/newsletter/aug00/article_miller.html > and it seems to me that it has a lot of bearing on how we design > dropdown menus. I just skimmed through the article you cited, and wanted to point out a key issue that I didn't see it address. Much of Miller's research (as I understand it) has to do with short term recall. Good UI's should try to rely on people's power of RECOGNITION instead of recall as much as possible. Users aren't required to memorize everything in a UI and then recall it. Grouping (aka chunking) in screen design allows users to work with "meta-things" so they only need to recall that there was a certain group on a page (e.g. a list of product links), but they wouldn't commit to memory each item in the group. When things aren't logically grouped, then the user has to rely more on recalling individual items. My knowledge in this area doesn't go real deep. Anyone have any good references on people's use of memory and usability? Regards, Lyle Kantrovich User Experience Architect Croc O' Lyle: a personal web log on usability, IA, and web design http://crocolyle.blogspot.com -----Original Message----- From: Kantrovich, Lyle /hdqt Sent: Monday, May 13, 2002 3:23 PM To: cwodtke@eleganthack.com; sigia-l@asis.org Cc: Kantrovich, Lyle /hdqt Subject: RE: [Sigia-l] aother one of them quickie questions (long drop downs) I posted an example just like this to my site a while back: Excuse me, your Johnson & Johnson is showing... http://crocolyle.blogspot.com/2002_01_06_crocolyle_archive.html#8533083 Why would a designer say "let's bombard our customers and potential investors with no less than nine, yes *9*, drop-down navigation boxes"? Notice that some drop-downs only have one choice -- why not just use a simple link?! I suppose someone said something about "we have to be consistent for usability's sake", bastardizing the precepts of User Interface Engineering like a religious zealot quoting scripture out of context. Also note that the "Company websites" drop-down has 368 options in it!!!! This has got to be some kind of nightmarish UI record. See the linkable list of web sites for a sense of the number of sites in the drop-down. (Scroll down to see the full list.) Evidently they need to learn the concept of "Information Architecture". Boy did I have the rant tone going that day or what? Blatantly irresponsible UI design can really get me worked up. :) Okay, so it's not as nightmarish as the 911 example cited, but a good example of how a large multi-national abuses drop-downs instead of creating a usable enterprise IA. (...and yes, I DID do a count to find out that there were exactly 368 items in the list.) See the post for related links. For the record Christina, your first question proved not to be a "quickie". :) Regards, Lyle Kantrovich User Experience Architect Croc O' Lyle: a personal web log on usability, IA, and web design http://crocolyle.blogspot.com -----Original Message----- From: cwodtke@eleganthack.com [mailto:cwodtke@eleganthack.com] Sent: Monday, May 13, 2002 2:35 PM To: sigia-l@asis.org Subject: [Sigia-l] aother one of them quickie questions anyone have an example of one of those nightmare long dropdowns that has everyting on the site in it? Content Management Symposium, Chicago O'Hare Marriott, June 28 - 30. See http://www.asis.org/CM ASIST SIG IA: http://www.asis.org/SIG/SIGIA/index.html _______________________________________________ Sigia-l mailing list Sigia-l@asis.org http://mail.asis.org/mailman/listinfo/sigia-l