Go Adrian!
I've always found it particularly irritating when the Magic Number is
being quoted at me in reference to number of items in a menu, # of
tabs, and the like...where the reason for making these things visible
is to *avoid* cases where people need to rely on their working memory,
with all its limitations.
kt
Katie Albers
Founder & Principal Consultant
FirstThought
User Experience Strategy & Project Management
310 356 7550
ka...@firstthought.com
On Feb 6, 2009, at 5:31 AM, Adrian Howard wrote:
On 5 Feb 2009, at 18:07, suze ingram wrote:
Oliver, take a look at Miller's working memory magical number 7
theory http://www.musanim.com/miller1956/.
[begin rant - not aimed at anybody in particular]
Glad to see a link to the original paper - if more folk actually
read it there would be far less silliness quoted about 7+-2!
Far _far_ to make people seem to think that Miller's research
applies to things like the number of items in a menu, the number of
tabs in a window, and many other areas *completely* out of scope of
the original research.
People can, and do, process more than 7+-2 items of information
every day. See this letter from Miller http://members.shaw.ca/philip.sharman/miller.txt
. To quote miller the 7+-2 number only applies to "unidimensional
stimuli (pitches, loudness, brightness, etc.) and also a limit for
immediate recall".
Even that conclusion probably needs to be revised. Research on short
term memory has obviously moved on a fair bit since 1956. Millers
"immediate memory" concept has mutated several times, and other
experiments have shown that that the "magic" number is more likely
to be lower than 7+-2 (e.g. see http://tinyurl.com/2fpse for more
recent info).
Even ignoring the more recent research the original paper doesn't
warrant the conclusions that many people draw from it. It's very
specifically _not_ about limits to general information comprehension.
Some discussion on the various ways it has been misinterpreted can
be found at:
* http://www.ddj.com/184412300
* http://ronz.blogspot.com/2002_07_21_ronz_archive.html
* http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/sep00.asp
* http://www.internettg.org/newsletter/aug00/article_miller.html
Also see: J.L. Doumont "Magical Numbers: The Seven-Plus-or-Minus
Two Myth," (Interface) IEEE Trans. Prof. Comm., vol. 45, pp.
123-127, 2002.
[end rant]
:-)
Cheers,
Adrian
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