UX design question

Out of context: Reply #15

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  • monNom1

    They say average person can hold between 4-7 distinct items in their short-term memory at once. (High IQ skews higher here, IIRC). Which means, if your set of choices exceeds that number, it will be more of a cognitive load to parse the list - it won't feel easy.

    Grouping items can help. Familiarity can help. But in general, if you have a system that people work on infrequently, or that is used by a broad swath of people, then you'll benefit from fewer choices at a time.

    For software where a specialist is using it constantly, and that person becomes familiar with it, a larger number of items can be visible at once in order to reduce the number of actions a user must take to initiate a task (increasing efficiency).

    Keyboard shortcuts are a further step beyond that, and are usually the mark of an expert user. A novice won't use them.

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