The magical number seven
This page is about how much info there should be on a webpage. This page showed seven items.
Later on, you'll see that five items is often the target for a page. Read more about seven items but don't go to any great depth.
Ideally users shouldn't have to remember anything. Once they have to remember more than 7 items, it's definitely time to redesign.
- In a well-designed system, you should never need to fall back on your faulty, unreliable short-term memory.
- The fewer bits of information users have to remember, the better.
- Use chunking and grouping aggressively to reduce the amount of information to remember. more but its tedious
There's reason to question the idea that we can cope with from five to nine ideas or bits of information at any one time. That debate can wait. Let's proceed with a target of five units per page. Keep track of the numbers per page as you travel.
