On Tue, 9 Nov 2004 20:28:52 +0100 Paul de Vrieze <pauldv@g.o>
wrote:
| > On Sunday 07 November 2004 15:47, Aron Griffis wrote:
| > > George Shapovalov wrote: [Sun Nov 07 2004, 05:12:02PM EST]
| > > I don't see how multi-tier categories makes things more findable
| > > personally.  IMHO it just makes things more buried.  I like the
| > > two-tier approach we have now:
| >
| > Some recent philosophical, err :), psychological studies concluded
| > that person normally deals best with 7-9 objects simultaneously.
| > Less than that and you have to make your "chain of command"
| > unnecessarily deep. More than that and you start spending more time
| > searching around or trying to remember what every one of these these
| > is about. (Don't remember where I saw it now; my wife is a
| > psychologist, that's most likely where :)).
| 
| It's not really new ;-), and is one of the basic properties of
| cognition (so basic it's part of any good Human Computer Interaction
| course). It is actually similar with numbers. Without tricks an
| average person can not remember more than 7 digits (without using
| tricks to remember things with a hint).

That is, 7 *unrelated* digits. If you ask someone (even a psych student)
to remember the sequence 123456789123456789 they probably won't have any
problems...

[ Yeah, ok, I'm just bitter because I have an HCI essay which covers
this kind of nonsense to write despite it being a computer *science*
course... ]

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Vim, Fluxbox, Sparc, Mips)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm