On 9 Feb 2009, at 22:14, Gretchen Anderson wrote:
Wow! Thanks for this. As someone who misunderstood the research,
it's helpful. But this brings up a question for me:
Intuitively, 7+-2 *seems* to be a nice boundary for many instances
(number of choices offered, groupings) and I'm curious if there is
research that bears this out. I know the book about how too much
choice actually paralyzes people from choosing. and personally, I do
have problems when I am forced to peruse a big list to choose
something.
Anything concrete from people? I think that the original research is
misconstrued because it reinforces some design judgment/instict, and
I wonder if there isn't something to that instinct.
Or maybe I just want to oversimplify. ;)
A more relevant bit of research here might be the Hick–Hyman Law http://tinyurl.com/agvhnb
which talks about reaction time when presented with a number of items.
Again - people tend to over-generalise the research. Things like
having the choices in a known predicable order (e.g. an alphabetical
list of countries), or where different options are presented
differently (e.g. having the most common choice in a fixed position
and highlighted) will affect naive interpretations.
As with most things "it depends" :-)
Adrian
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