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Hi, The magic seven comes from a well know article form George Miller in 1956 called "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information". In this now famous article, Miller stated that the short term memory can handle 7 elements plus or minus 2. This means that gifted people can remember with their short term memory 9 elements and the less gifted 5. The average person can remember 7 and thus, this is why the number 7 is called the magic seven. it is the "short term memory register" (kind of) of the average person on this planet. Bell Labs used the result of this research to design an addressing system that could be handled by the average person. At Xerox PARC we used the same principle to design the desktop and the notion of pull down or context menus. Originally a pull down or context menu has been created to relieve the long term memory (i.e. a command line based system) and use instead the short term memory. This is why a menu containing 7 elements (the magic seven) is better designed than a menu having 10 elements (above the gifted persons capabilities). From these studies we discovered that the tendency to chunk data is based on our intuitive knowledge of our magic seven short term memory limitations. This is why we tend to decompose things in hierarchies or do a process known as chunking the information universe. So, the magic seven concept is also known as the Miller principle and you can find that in the 1956 published paper named "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information" by George Miller. regards Didier PH Martin mailto:martind@n... http://www.netfolder.com -----Original Message----- From: owner-xml-dev@i... [mailto:owner-xml-dev@i...]On Behalf Of John E. Simpson Sent: Friday, July 02, 1999 8:32 AM To: XML Developers' List Subject: Off-topic: Magic Number 7 (WAS: Re: XML Editors - Word 2000??) At 10:23 AM 7/2/1999 +0100, Philip Nye wrote: >Rick Jelliffe wrote: ... >> 1) you have to remember the name, this is difficult if there are more >> than 7 names in frequent use; >> 2) if there are more than 7 elements at any one level, there is a >> selection >> problem for GUIs: style provides a way to key hierarchy that provides >> reinforcing feedback; ... >Incidentally, where does the magic number 7 come from? When I was at AT&T years ago, there was a company legend (possibly apocryphal) about the length of US telephone numbers. According to this legend, Bell Labs had surveyed large numbers of customers and determined that, on average, people could remember 7 "things," plus or minus 3, about another "thing." Ergo, a phone number would optimally be made up of: a 4-digit "main portion," sans exchange and area code; a 3-digit exchange; and a 3-digit area code. This was supposedly in descending order of need to remember the additional portions, assuming that you'd need primarily to call people in your own exchange, followed by people in your area code but outside your exchange, followed by people in other area codes. I don't know where Rick's magic 7 comes from. ============================================================= John E. Simpson | It's no disgrace t'be poor, simpson@p... | but it might as well be. | -- "Kin" Hubbard xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...) xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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