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Miller’s Law – A Rule in Product Design and Life Management

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Re: Miller’s Law – A Rule in Product Design and Life Management

#51

Post by rasengan0 »

aragorn2 wrote: post #50

Off topic: I got all 20. What you do is invent a story in pictures. A cat was playing with a ball under the tree. An apple fell from tree on cats head. The cat squared around the apple and ran inside the house through a small door into her box. King dad drove in his car, took out huge hammer from the trunk and hit the box of milk. Milk sprayed all over the house and inside the fish tank. Fish got restless and caused…

I forgot my pimping king with thor hammer was riding in a car so 19/20 for me. I wonder when Miller's law is gamed with this narrative technique how information design is tailored to this long tail of users. Story as the new UI.

Re: Miller’s Law – A Rule in Product Design and Life Management

#52

Post by amelius »

lalaithion wrote: post #48

Related to the idea of chunking, I remembered 15 words easily, using a clever technique that I read about a few years ago. Instead of trying to remember each word individually, I remembered scenes. This enabled me to remember more than 7 words, because the chunks no longer were words, but were combinations of words. For example, for the words "king" and "hammer", I imagined a king hammer ruling over his subjects. For…

But how do you free working memory when you're done?

Re: Miller’s Law – A Rule in Product Design and Life Management

#54

Post by [deleted] »

libertyEQ wrote: post #31
radiorental wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be argued that most western system do also, anything below a D is a fail. Depending on how you look at it we either have a 5 or 8 level system if +/- is used.

I'm not sure why you were DV'd, but in grad school in the US a C is considered failing.

[deleted]

Re: Miller’s Law – A Rule in Product Design and Life Management

#55

Post by rpedela »

phkahler wrote: post #28
brianpan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seven plus or minus two refers to working memory. When you encounter say a navigation menu with 10+ unstructured items, it becomes impossible to consider all the options at once.

But when you look at a menu, you know what you're looking for so it's a matter of identifying one thing. Aside from convenience I don't think the length of a menu matters much.

The point is when you don't know what you are looking for exactly. The Abobe products are a good example of this. I don't use Photoshop often so I forget where stuff is. Having a lot of menus and each menu having a large number of options makes it difficult for a novice user (like me) to find the resize image dialog, for example. To be fair, Photoshop is designed for experts and expert users will learn an interface no matter how crappy it is so it isn't a big deal in this case. But the endless options and menus do make it harder for novice users.

If the menus and options were grouped in way that is in line with human psychology, it would be easier for novice users to find that one option. I know the Office ribbon gets flack on HN but Miller's Law is one of the big reasons for the Office ribbon and how it is designed which makes it a lot easier for novice and intermediate users to find that one option in Office.

Re: Miller’s Law – A Rule in Product Design and Life Management

#56

Post by dizzystar »

isostatic wrote: post #39
pySSK wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The international Baccalaureate uses a 7 point scale: http://www.isnsz.com/media/images/Assessment_6.width-800.png I generally like my scales to be logarithmic. At work, I made the following scale to explain difficulty of technical items to non-technical people. It works quite well: Effort Scale 1: Easy peasy 2: Trivial but time-consuming 3: Some invention required and non-trivial 4: Invention required 5: Lot of inve…

With Uber I considered a 4 to be "nothing wrong", and reserve 5 for "amazing service above and beyond". However it seems that drivers who have an average of say "4.2", despite being perfectly fine and giving above and beyond service 1 in 5 times, gets kicked off. This means that 5 is acceptable and there's no way to mark above acceptable. I'm odd, I don't expect every trip I get to be above average. That's clearly no…

That 4.2 thing really disturbed me. Most people driving for Uber aren't doing it because they want to over their alternative to nothing. I couldn't, in good conscience, give out a rating that puts someone's livelihood at risk.

I only gave out one 3 star, but that was because the driver was very bad, though not taxi-driver bad, which is what I would consider 1-star.

Re: Miller’s Law – A Rule in Product Design and Life Management

#57

Post by aidenn0 »

JasonCEC wrote: post #33
iambateman wrote: post #3

You know how people say: “on a scale of 1-10”? I’ve used the principle of Millers law to start asking people to measure on a scale of 1-7. Universally, people balk at the scale. But I explain to them that most people can’t tell the difference between 2 and 3 on a ten point scale. If you can’t articulate a difference, there’s no use in the measurement. Seven is great because you get more than the simplicity of 1-5. So…

There is actually a whole theory around this, and has lots of implications for the designs of hedonic and sensory scales. I work on modeling human sensory perception and preference of food and beverage products, and have had to design scales that work as a true "metric"; Most scales suffer from 3 primary problems: 1) avoidance of the endpoints 2) tendency towards the mean 3) minimum information gain For example; on a…

One place I worked we changed the scale from 1-5 to qualitative descriptors (I don't remember the exact words but something like "poor, average, good, great, perfect") and it significantly increased the information we got. Previously we almost never got any scores other than 1,4,5. Afterwards we started seeing more 2s and 3s. It seemed that people only needed one value for "bad" so putting "average" at 2 was very helpful.

Re: Miller’s Law – A Rule in Product Design and Life Management

#58

Post by aidenn0 »

joshuaheard wrote: post #32

This is why phone numbers are 7 digits long: xxx-xxxx. Then, add another "chunk" for the area code: (xxx) xxx-xxxx.

It was even shorter before when the exchange was represented with a word and a number (e.g. KLondike 5 for 555).

Re: Miller’s Law – A Rule in Product Design and Life Management

#59

Post by gilbetron »

A psych professor claimed, years ago, that the number is actually 5 +/- 2, but I can't remember his argument. Something about including error of measurement from the experiments, maybe? Regardless, he said it is why 7 phone # digits is often difficult for some people, because it is on the high end of what most people can remember.

Re: Miller’s Law – A Rule in Product Design and Life Management

#60

Post by BoppreH »

friedButter wrote: post #9

I think 5-9 words is much more than 7 bits of information...

Not sure why you were downvoted.

The comment below mine, about "bit" being used as "piece", was my first thought too. But then the author contrasts with a quote using the actual entropy definition of a bit.

And chunking doesn't work as an explanation either, even with Huffman encoding, unless half of all words you ever use are "cat".

Note that even if the word was used incorrectly, it makes no difference on the author's argument.

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