7+-2 does not apply to any except the most obscure design problems. The widespread use of 7+-2 in design shows that designers want to appear familiar with research while they remain ignorant of it.

Celebrating over 45 years of confusion about George Miller's work!

At least partially because of the success of Miller’s paper, the number “seven” is now almost universally and erroneously accepted as the human capacity limit for a wide range of issues.

Although Miller (1956) offered his magical number only as a rhetorical device, the number did serve to characterize performance in many tasks. It has been taken more literally as a memory limit by many researchers.

While Miller's "Magic (7±2)" principle reminds us of moderation, it is not appropriate for fundamental navigation decisions and leads to an arbitrary "one-size-fits-all" solution. In no event should it be taken as an absolute law.

Everybody knows that there is a finite span of immediate memory and that for a lot of different kinds of test materials this span is about seven items in length. I have just shown you that there is a span of absolute judgment that can distinguish about seven categories and that there is a span of attention that will encompass about six objects at a glance. What is more natural than to think that all three of these spans are different aspects of a single underlying process? And that is a fundamental mistake, as I shall be at some pains to demonstrate.