In defense of 7 +/-2 steps per procedure

[SteveFJong -at- aol -dot- com]

Not wanting to contribute to filling that other cup (Caution! Beverage is 
hot!), I would like to post in defense of the much-lambasted seven-step 
guideline for procedural steps.

First, I have read Miller's original paper, which describes how many items a 
person can retain in short-term memory. I believe it more clearly applies to 
arcane fields such as telephone number length and the optimum cast size for 
television shows. (Seriously 8^) The question is whether users retain steps 
in a procedure in short-term memory, or if they simply look at the page 
(retaining nothing in memory).

In my personal experience, I find longer procedures more difficult. I wonder 
how I know how far into the procedure I am--is it by step number, by position 
on the page, or by glancing at all the steps and remembering them in some 
gestalt way? When I'm writing a procedure, it's by step number, but as a user 
I'm not sure.

The psychological principle of closure definitely comes into play in 
completing procedures. Tension rises with each step; a fifty-step procedure 
is going to be more difficult to complete without error than a five-step 
procedure for this reason alone. I would argue (and would anyone disagree?) 
that a fifty-step procedure is on the face of it a lousy UI design.

In fact, adhering to a seven-step rule gives you an opportunity to argue 
against long procedures simply because there are more than even steps (or, in 
structured documentation methodology, you can't fit it on the page!).

I suggest an experimental approaches to this: Rather than debate whether the 
principle applies or not, try it out! Test users on procedures of varying 
lengths, and note whether they make more errors on longer procedures and 
where the problems start. This is the same technique Miller used, and a tech 
comm student well grounded in experimental method could do this quickly 
enough. I predict that user errors will grow quickly past ten steps.

          -- Steve

Steven Jong, Documentation Team Manager (Typo? What tpyo?)
Lightbridge, Inc., 67 South Bedford St., Burlington, MA 01803 USA
mailto:jong -at- lightbridge -dot- com -dot- nospam          781.359.4902 [voice]
Home Sweet Homepage: http://members.aol.com/SteveFJong

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