[Sigia-l] length of nav labels

[Marcel van Mackelenbergh]

Hi Jared,

> The important thing is that you have the right *trigger* word 
> in that 7-12 mix.

I like your concept of trigger words. I wonder why you didn't mention
there the concept of basic-levelness as was introduced by George Lakoff
in "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things". The concept of basic-levelness is
a quality of words where the level of abstraction is optimal: not too
abstract, not too specific. For example "car" is optimal because
everyone understands right away what is meant. However, "vehicle" is too
abstract and is therefore less basic-level. So many things can be used
as a vehicle that the user does not immediately understand what is
meant. On the other hand, "Mercedes C-class" is too specific and has
therefore also little basic-levelness. Users need to think about the
mark and type before they understand what is meant.

One remark though on your 7 - 12 guideline. This guideline (and more
often the 5 - 9 guideline) just keeps on popping up too many times. It
comes from a research conducted by Endel Tulving in 1964. Tulving had
his subjects of experiment recall unrelated words and found pretty
constant numbers. What is important here is that these words are
unrelated. Once the reader sees that words are related, the reader will
create larger and therefore fewer chunks of information. 

The assumption is that the reader needs to keep all these chunks in his
(working) memory at the same time in order to process them. You would
make me happy if you replaced "words" by "chunks". 

Marcel