Re: [boost] [website] Proposal for new page - Libraries By Type

From: Beth Jacobson (bethj_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-02-21 14:33:37

Aleksey Gurtovoy wrote:
> Beth Jacobson writes:
>> I think this categorization is the best I've seen so far (mine 
>> included). I'd like to see no more than 7-8 major categories though, to 
>> make the list seem more accessable and browsable. 
> 
> Seems like an arbitrary limit to me.

Not entirely. It's common wisdom that ~7 is a 'comfortable' size for a 
group of items (IIRC, the number was chosen because research that found 
that the average person can hold ~7 items in short-term memory). If you 
look around the internet, you'll see that the on the bulk of 
professionally designed sites, the main menus have ~7 items. (Rene's 
latest effort has 7 in the top menu.) When there are significantly more, 
they're usually arranged into no more than 7-8 groups with no more than 
7-8 items in each.

Scanning (e.g. looking down a list of categories for one that meets a 
specific criterion) is different from browsing. When scanning, the brain 
can just throw out items that don't match so the short-term limit 
doesn't apply. For the new page I'm envisioning though, the emphasis is 
not on looking for something specific, but looking around and seeing if 
there's anything of interest. In that situation, a shorter list will 
seem more inviting and be easier to deal with. This isn't an absolute 
rule (if someone came up with an ideal categorization with 9, or even 10 
items, I'd go for it), but it's a good rule of thumb.

> 
> How does adding a level of hierarchy make things "more accessible"?
> For me, it's quite the opposite: it increases chances that I'll have
> to browse through insides of several categories because the top-level
> names are so generic that the library I'm looking for could be in half
> of them. 
> 

Remember, the page layout will be similar to the sample page I put up. 
Each major category will have a short descriptive paragraph attached to 
it. Also the page will be flatter than the number of levels suggests. 
When someone clicks on a top-level category, they'll go immediately to 
the list of libraries in that group arranged by sub- or 
sub-sub-category, so it will still only take one click to get to the 
good stuff.

Most of your objections seem to be with the new page's usefulness in 
searching, and I agree that the arrangement I'm suggesting is less than 
ideal for that. Maybe the answer is to have separate pages: one for 
browsing and one for searching. If I understand correctly, David's 
objection is that that two category pages (or one 'by category' and one 
'by type') will be confusing because people have no good way of choosing 
between them. David, could we avoid this just by changing the name of 
the new page  from 'By Type' to 'Browse the Libraries' or something like 
that? If we try to make one page work for both browsing and searching, 
I'm afraid we'll end up compromising on both.