In 1956, cognitive psychologist George Miller published a paper entitled, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information". In his research, he had determined that human short-term memory had a capacity of 7±2 chunks of information. Since then, this "fact" has taken on the mantle of "the Way It Is." Ever wonder why local phone numbers are 7 digits (at the time, it was too expensive to call long distance to worry about remembering area codes)?
If Miller were to conduct his experiments these 53 (Happy New Year, btw) years later, I suspect his findings might be different. The amount of information we must have available to us at any given time is such that we use up our chunks by remembering the places we keep the information we need rather than the information itself. Ellen Wagner recently referred to this as our "dashboard life."
This month's Wired Magazine offers a look at a typical player screen in World of Warcraft, shown below.
And why would a player have so much clutter on the screen? I mean, you can barely see the actual game.
In fact, except for the Bejeweled game ("I need to play Bejeweled so badly I can't even wait to quit WoW first."), each of those windows and icons represents information or tools that are critical to game play. Between item availability lists, food levels, quest tracking, power ups, weapon activation, team communications, area maps, and more, this player would be only marginally effective without all these dashboard pallettes at the ready.
What lessons can designers of immersive learning experiences draw from this?
- A click away - when I was a baby designer, the folks at Apple taught me that good interface design meant that the user should always be only a click away from what s/he wanted to do next. User demands and expectations haven't lowered.
- Dashboard interfaces are familiar and comfortable - if well implemented.
- Dashboard design should not be separate from the overall interface design. These two layers should complement each other for the ease of the user.
- An effective dashboard is the result of smart, tight information architecture, UX design, and usability testing.
I'm serious,
Anne
