> It shouldn't take me more than three clicks to get from my starting point to the information I'm looking for.
I see this sort of criteria and really don't agree. There are many operations that take more than three clicks. Navigation a UI is a graph in itself, and we can handle way more than 3 nodes.
In the same way that I can remember how to get to work, or get a book from one of my bookshelves.
There was a joke in one of Stephen Hawking's book that each equation included in the text cuts the number of readers by half. In a similar fashion, you can imagine that each extra step you need to get to the information will cut the number of occasions you do so by half. If you want the system to benefit you daily, in many areas, it has to be as simple and seamless as possible.
Fascinating observation, and could be a corrolary to Nudge theory [1], which won Richard Thaler his Nobel Prize this year, which says Opt-in rather than opt-out is more effective for changing behavior.
I would not expect you could get a Nobel Prize for that, though. Maybe Scott Alexander should start submitting his articles wherever it is you need to submit them to get a Nobel in economics.
> In 2017, economist Richard Thaler was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for "his contributions to behavioral economics and his pioneering work in establishing that people are predictably irrational in ways that defy economic theory."
Proving that all the other economists are modeling things wrong is more impressive than you make it sound.
I see this sort of criteria and really don't agree. There are many operations that take more than three clicks. Navigation a UI is a graph in itself, and we can handle way more than 3 nodes. In the same way that I can remember how to get to work, or get a book from one of my bookshelves.
Anyway, small point.