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On Tue, 9 Nov 2004 20:28:52 +0100 Paul de Vrieze <pauldv@g.o> |
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wrote: |
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| > On Sunday 07 November 2004 15:47, Aron Griffis wrote: |
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| > > George Shapovalov wrote: [Sun Nov 07 2004, 05:12:02PM EST] |
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| > > I don't see how multi-tier categories makes things more findable |
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| > > personally. IMHO it just makes things more buried. I like the |
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| > > two-tier approach we have now: |
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| > |
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| > Some recent philosophical, err :), psychological studies concluded |
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| > that person normally deals best with 7-9 objects simultaneously. |
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| > Less than that and you have to make your "chain of command" |
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| > unnecessarily deep. More than that and you start spending more time |
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| > searching around or trying to remember what every one of these these |
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| > is about. (Don't remember where I saw it now; my wife is a |
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| > psychologist, that's most likely where :)). |
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| |
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| It's not really new ;-), and is one of the basic properties of |
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| cognition (so basic it's part of any good Human Computer Interaction |
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| course). It is actually similar with numbers. Without tricks an |
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| average person can not remember more than 7 digits (without using |
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| tricks to remember things with a hint). |
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|
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That is, 7 *unrelated* digits. If you ask someone (even a psych student) |
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to remember the sequence 123456789123456789 they probably won't have any |
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problems... |
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|
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[ Yeah, ok, I'm just bitter because I have an HCI essay which covers |
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this kind of nonsense to write despite it being a computer *science* |
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course... ] |
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|
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-- |
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Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Vim, Fluxbox, Sparc, Mips) |
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Mail : ciaranm at gentoo.org |
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Web : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm |
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