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Been playing around with the navigation on my guinea pig theme, and have found something interesting. With drop menus, anything up to four items per group is easy to see and comprehend at a glance.

Five just starts to lost the plot by the time you get to the end of the group.

If there's six in a group, by the time I've read to the end I will have forgotten what was at the start and will want to scan back again, which of course leads to forgetting what was at the end if I haven't already memorised the entire list.

Anything over six and it's "Where the Fukawi?" syndrome.

Now as far as I know I'm not coming down with Alzheimer's yet, so I assume this is fairly normal human cognitive stuffz. My conclusion is that if we want a gui that is as n00b/doofus-friendly as possible, then ideally our nav system should be arranged so that all items are clearly divided into groups of four or less.

I'm ok with that. Seems pretty sensible for things displayed, so as not to confuse anyone. I wouldn't hiccup over 5 items if we deem it worthy either. But 6? Off with your head!

I vaguely remember something about the average mug being able to memorise a list of seven items without too much difficulty, but of course that was when they were told to memorise the list. Seems to me it's sort of like the engineering concepts of ultimate load and safe working load. SWL is a lot lower.

Also seem to remember something about pit crew notices to drivers having to be limited to only a few items, for ease of comprehension in a hurry. Anyway I agree that 5 is ok, and 6 if we ever really really need to, but best to keep it to 4 wherever possible. 4 is a nice number.

Hey another thing. There is always argument over the "response prefix". Some people claim they like it. Others totally hate the thing. I'm in the latter camp, but the crew on the site I run is a mixture. So, I got sneaky. I just removed it, everywhere, without mentioning that I'd done this. it has been running that way for a couple of weeks now, and there hasn't been a single complaint. Nobody has noticed, or the ones who have noticed don't care.

I must say the pages look quite a bit less cluttered too.