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On Sun, 2004-11-07 at 18:43 -0800, George Shapovalov wrote: |
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> Some recent philosophical, err :), psychological studies concluded that person |
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> normally deals best with 7-9 objects simultaneously. Less than that and you |
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> have to make your "chain of command" unnecessarily deep. More than that and |
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> you start spending more time searching around or trying to remember what |
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> every one of these these is about. (Don't remember where I saw it now; my |
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> wife is a psychologist, that's most likely where :)). |
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> |
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> This is essentially the reason why we use hierarchies so widely. If every |
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> person was able to easily memorise and deal with indefinitely large lists we |
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> wouldn't be organizing stuff at all, why bother if you can just come in at |
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> any moment and pick exactly that regularly gray box of standard size in a big |
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> pile on the floor :). Now, that 7-9 is an average. I believe the deal is that |
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> every person has some individual "most effective number" but the distribution |
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> peaks somewhere in that range and is not very wide.. |
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Working memory is indeed about 7 items (people claiming much more are |
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most likely incorrectly tested). Hierarchies are useful allright, but |
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there are certainly better ways to interact with large quantities of |
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information, eg. visualizations, spatial information. |
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> Incidentally we have exactly 8 major top-level categories ;) : |
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> app-, dev-, games-, mail-, net-, sys-, www-, x11- |
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Well since it's all major-minor laid out, i think the effect of the 8 |
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items is already growing weaker (you still get a listing of a few dozen |
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dirs). Plus the fact that the major category layout has sort of ad-hoc |
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evolved & as such has little meaning, there is clearly overlap in the |
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major categories already. |
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Personally i think the current lay-out is therefore not really fit to be |
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searched in a meaningful way. A more strict & deeper lay-out would help |
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in some sense, but also it introduces the problem of packages (and there |
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are a lot) that fit multiple categories. I don't think it's needed to |
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change the current existing lay-out to improve package searching, the |
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right way to go is abstract the rather random categories idea away by |
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creating a fast & smart searching tool. |
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- foser |
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