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Depth versus breadth in the arrangement of Web
links, Zaphiris, P. and Mtei, L., (1998) original
paper.
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After arriving at your Web site, what is the maximum number of mouse
clicks a user should have to make before getting to useful information?
Ever since Miller's totally misunderstood "7" article, people
have been watching for another good number. Currently, one of the main
candidates has to do with identifying the maximum number of mouse clicks.
Is it 2, 3, 4 or the magical 7?
Zaphiris and Mtei surveyed the old "breadth and depth" literature
related to menu design to determine whether it was better to have a few
pages with a large number of links appearing on each page, or to have
more pages with fewer links per page.
In general, the "breadth and depth" menu research suggests
that it is better to have more items at each level, and fewer levels.
In their study, they found the same. The fastest performance came from
having a web site with two levels, i.e., requiring two clicks.
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Web page design: Implications for memory, structure
and scent for information retrieval, Larson, K. and Czerwinski,
M., CHI 98 Conference Proceedings, 25-32, (1998).
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Larson and Czerwinski (1998) also considered the breadth and depth issues.
They summarized the past research as finding that "most studies found
that breadth was better than depth for organizing menu structure."
In their study they compared web sites that had two levels with those
that had three levels.
They reported that the 2-level web sites enabled reliably faster searches
than the 3-level site.
It appears that the new magic number for system designers is "2".
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