24 · Remembering
Miller's Law
People can keep about seven things in mind at once, give or take two.
Evidence: Holds, with limitsWhat we do with it
- 01
Design for three or four things held in mind at once. That's closer to what later research found.
- 02
Long lists are fine when people can see them. The limit is on what they have to remember, and a menu on screen isn't remembered.
Examples
Getting it wrong, getting it right.
Don't
A navigation bar cut to exactly seven items, with the eighth buried under “More” because of a rule.
Do
Nine items in two clear groups. People don't memorize a nav bar; they scan it.
The evidence
What the research says.
Miller was describing a pattern he kept running into across experiments, and he said so. Nelson Cowan's 2001 review called the seven a rough estimate and a rhetorical device, and put the real capacity at about four chunks once people can't rehearse or group things. In 2010 Cowan settled on three to five items for young adults.
How our view changed
We design for three or four things held in mind at once, and we never use “seven” to cap a menu.
Sources
- Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63(2).
- Cowan, N. (2001). The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1).
- Cowan, N. (2010). The magical mystery four: How is working memory capacity limited, and why? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(1).
Last reviewed November 7, 2026. How we keep this current