How many items should one list row contain?

Question

How many items are recommended to put in one row of the list? Are there any recommendations, how many items should one row contains in the list? A lot of famous e-shops put a lot of items in one row, is this a good practice, or just a saving of space?

I am creating a list page, each item of which contains a lot of information, so decided to show one item on each page that contains image in the right, and title/description on the left... but later I found a lot of similar pages, which show a big image instead of text, and only the title of message

So, are there any recommendations? are big images more informative than smaller image and text? or this is for space economy?

Answer 1

I have reservations about "answer"ing this, since as user @Izhaki points out, it depends so much on the context - one cannot really say what looks best without seeing.. anything.

That said - I would suggest that any more than 7 is starting to become untidy.

How do I arrive at that number? I recall that on average people can perceive 7 distinct entities, for example if you hold 5 peas in your hand, show me, and then remove your hand, I can tell you there were 5. If you do it with 9, on average people cannot accurately tell you how many peas you were holding. That's a sort-of justification. Then take this page's navigation for example:

There are six items. It looks pretty good, but imagine having a few more:

It starts to become unwieldy pretty quickly.

Regarding images, the trend in web design is undeniably toward bigger images, less text, more (or less depending on how you look at it) design.

Ultimately though, it's going to depend on your users, so I think the best you can do is just iterate. Try it, and see. Is there more engagement? Do they find what they're looking for quicker? Do they like it?