Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

Grouping Things

Humans may be capable of picking from dozens of choices, but that doesn’t mean you should throw ungrouped lists of choices at them. Being confronted by a wall of seemingly equally valid choices is discouraging.

It helps users when you group or order choices in a meaningful way. Better grouping allows users to more easily scan the available options. The maximum number of choices that can appear on a single screen is mainly constrained by the design of the page that shows the choices to the user. If many different choices appear at the current level of the hierarchy, grouping them—in a way, adding a local, visual hierarchy to the choices—helps users find the option they are looking for among a large number of choices. This is sometimes ...