[Sigia-l] aother one of them quickie questions (long drop downs)

[Lyle_Kantrovich at cargill.com]

Christina said: 
> I was just readign this great article
> http://www.internettg.org/newsletter/aug00/article_miller.html
> and it seems to me that it has a lot of bearing on how we design 
> dropdown menus.

I just skimmed through the article you cited, and wanted to point out a 
key issue that I didn't see it address.  Much of Miller's research (as 
I understand it) has to do with short term recall.  Good UI's should 
try to rely on people's power of RECOGNITION instead of recall as much 
as possible.  Users aren't required to memorize everything in a UI and 
then recall it.

Grouping (aka chunking) in screen design allows users to work with 
"meta-things" so they only need to recall that there was a certain 
group on a page (e.g. a list of product links), but they wouldn't 
commit to memory each item in the group.  When things aren't logically 
grouped, then the user has to rely more on recalling individual items.

My knowledge in this area doesn't go real deep.  Anyone have any good 
references on people's use of memory and usability?

Regards,

Lyle Kantrovich
User Experience Architect

Croc O' Lyle: a personal web log on usability, IA, and web design
http://crocolyle.blogspot.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Kantrovich, Lyle /hdqt 
Sent: Monday, May 13, 2002 3:23 PM
To: cwodtke at eleganthack.com; sigia-l at asis.org
Cc: Kantrovich, Lyle /hdqt
Subject: RE: [Sigia-l] aother one of them quickie questions (long drop
downs)


I posted an example just like this to my site a while back:

Excuse me, your Johnson & Johnson is showing...
http://crocolyle.blogspot.com/2002_01_06_crocolyle_archive.html#8533083

<excerpt>
Why would a designer say "let's bombard our customers and potential 
investors with no less than nine, yes *9*, drop-down navigation boxes"? 
Notice that some drop-downs only have one choice -- why not just use a 
simple link?! I suppose someone said something about "we have to be 
consistent for usability's sake", bastardizing the precepts of User 
Interface Engineering like a religious zealot quoting scripture out of 
context. Also note that the "Company websites" drop-down has 368 
options in it!!!! This has got to be some kind of nightmarish UI 
record. See the linkable list of web sites for a sense of the number of 
sites in the drop-down. (Scroll down to see the full list.) Evidently 
they need to learn the concept of "Information Architecture".
</excerpt>

Boy did I have the rant tone going that day or what?   Blatantly 
irresponsible UI design can really get me worked up.  :)

Okay, so it's not as nightmarish as the 911 example cited, but a good 
example of how a large multi-national abuses drop-downs instead of 
creating a usable enterprise IA.

(...and yes, I DID do a count to find out that there were exactly 368 
items in the list.)

See the post for related links.

For the record Christina, your first question proved not to be a 
"quickie".  :)

Regards,

Lyle Kantrovich
User Experience Architect

Croc O' Lyle: a personal web log on usability, IA, and web design
http://crocolyle.blogspot.com



-----Original Message-----
From: cwodtke at eleganthack.com [mailto:cwodtke at eleganthack.com]
Sent: Monday, May 13, 2002 2:35 PM
To: sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: [Sigia-l] aother one of them quickie questions


anyone have an example of one of those nightmare long dropdowns that has
everyting on the site in it?