Design For Working Memory Limitations

[Sachiel]

Users can remember relatively few items of information for a relatively short period of time. This "working memory" capacity tends to lessen even more as people become older. When users must remember information on one Web page for use on another page or another location on the same page, they can only remember about three or four items for a few seconds. If users must make comparisons, it is best to have the items being compared side-by-side so that users do not have to remember information even for a short period of time.

Key : Do not require users to remember information from place to place on a website.

 

[dotcomguy]

Bread Crumbs

A bread-crumb trail is a method for keeping track of where you are in a site so that you can retrace your route (the name comes from the bread-crumb trail that Hansel and Gretel left behind in the Grimm’s fairy tale). Each spot on the trail, except the last, is a link. Keith Instone from IBM analyzed bread-crumb trails and discovered that there are three types:

• Location bread crumb, which tells the users “You are here” in the site’s hierarchy. This type reports the user’s position rather than tracking it and is therefore essentially static.
• Path bread crumb, which shows the users each page they’ve touched. This type is dynamic and especially useful for data-driven applications. Two users on the same page may have gotten there two different ways, and the bread crumbs will show that.
• Attribute bread crumb, which looks like a bread crumb but doesn’t track the users’ trek through the site. Rather, it acts like an extended keyword. Attribute bread crumbs are most often used on search sites and e-commerce sites. More than one path can appear on the same page, and since they are set up by an indexing process rather than via the user’s movement through the site, they may not change between visits.

 

[kiz9999]

i have never actually thought about this so thanks for the eye opener!