Designing an Online Experience

I have been doing some work with online experience design lately and was reminded about the 7+-2 rule.

I remember reading somewhere that the human brain can deal with between 5 and 9 (7+-2) ideas at a time. So when you present information, it needs to be broken down into 7+-2 chunks. Put another way, you have 7+-2 goes to convince your reader that you have the answer to their problem, before they simply click away to another page.

Finally, here are a few useful sites for online experience execution:

1. css Zen Garden: clever site transformations using CSS (hint: click on the different layouts listed on the right hand panel).
2. Web Design Inspiration: a Flickr stream of images of well designed sites. Perhaps the most interesting part is reading different peoples comment reactions to each site - add your own.
3. css Beauty: css web design resources.