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AW: Link mania: there's nothing magical about Miller's number 7!
Subject:AW: Link mania: there's nothing magical about Miller's number 7! From:"Reng, Winfried" <winfried -dot- reng -at- msi-muenchen -dot- de> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 23 Jan 2001 16:53:32 +0100
Hi,
> Also, you might take a look at the way Microsoft and Adobe
> (among others)
> build their application interfaces. In any toolbar or menu
> there are usually
> about 4 choices before some kind of visual break. I think the
> only exception
> to that rule is the file menu bar and I suppose that would be
> because its
> format and ubiquitous presence have made it usable as is.
Some months ago on a conference someone reported
about the Online conference 2000 in London. There
someone reported that Microsoft attempts to show
less than 7 subtopics in one topic and only a
rather shallow topic hierarchy so that many topics
can be found only by chance or by full text search
or when someone clicks on a certain hyperlink.
This approach is based on tests. Too many links
would confuse or irritate or intimidate the user.
I can´t tell whether this is only a Microsoft
finding or whether others found the same.
Cheers,
Winfried
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