Chunk it or lose them

Chunking can make every fragment legible and the whole subject impossible to navigate. Editors admire the cards. Readers still need a route.

The famous seven-plus-or-minus-two idea concerns limits on what people can hold at once. It does not bless every arbitrary act of chopping. Six tidy categories can be worse than one long page when nobody knows which category contains their question.

A benefits page offers money, work, housing, family, health and other. Someone with £7,000 wants to know whether savings affect eligibility. “Money” produces three cards. “Savings” produces thresholds. An exception depends on age, another on a partner, and “other help” returns to the original categories.

Dense prose is broken into colourful cards; each fragment looks manageable. Nine clicks later, the answer remains dispersed across them.

The navigation has been organised around the publisher’s nouns. The visitor arrived with a situation. Those are different structures masquerading as the same information.

This is why readability scores can congratulate a page that nobody can use. Sentences shrink. Cards brighten. Headings become friendlier. The relationship between rule, exception and personal circumstance stays buried in the sequence.

The jointly owned property exception leads to a contact number. The line is open until four. The clock reads 4.07. The number is copied into a note for tomorrow.