Memory: Either Work With It, or It Will Destroy Your Design

(often correspondently to Working Memory)

It stores information received recently by sensory memory. It’s brief and limited, holding information for seconds to one minute.

George Miller, the psychologist who wrote “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” (1956) suggested that people can store between five and nine items in short-term memory.

More recent research affirmed that people are able to store 4 chunks of content.

When it’s not rehearsed or actively maintained, the information lasts few seconds to one minute.

Although there are some individuals variations, the average ordinary customer is included in the majority group of limited use of short-term memory. Work considering it.

The ability to compare easily is very useful to help users deal with their short-term memory limitations. When a user needs to decide the best option to buy among other interesting alternatives, without a dedicated page to compare selected items, they would need to check one per one, be frustrated to try to keep in mind the details that they will forget quickly and if they don’t give up, they could use a paper and pen to take notes and appeal to an external cognition resource creating their own comparison system physically.

When we are in a car passing in a row of businesses, our long-term memory that learned about those brand logos will know them and what those signs would look like for us in a fraction of a second, is defined for our iconic memory, which is a part of sensory memory.

There is a candy store near my house that is not so attractive visually outside, but they invest hard in the smell of it. Every time I pass in front of it, I want to eat candies. Coincidence? I guess not.

This is a memorization technique we are got used to with phone numbers. Which is easier to memorize?

According to Daniel Bor, a neuroscientist author of The Ravenous Brain, it’s a human natural tendency to see patterns and work better with them, as we know also based on the Gestalt laws.

The same we can do with words.

A random list with many items will be better to memorize if similar items are gathered by categories.

Change links colors for visited pages is already an expected behavior. It supports short-term memory limitations.

If it’s not applied, we take the risk of making the users walk in circles. Making them revisit pages already navigated and confused about which way to go. A disoriented user with a reduced sense of mastery will give up faster.

When we are in an eCommerce where a lot of products will be added to the cart, it’s normal to forget what was added previously.

Without a way to check the selected products, probably the time to shop will be longer since duplicate products can be sent to the cart, and after we would need to adjust the product’s quantities.

In the image below, this supermarket offers an approach that makes it easier. For the products already added, the CTA will disappear and will be replaced by a quantity input indicating how many of that product is added.

If we know that most people only can keep a small quantity of information at a given time, it’s understandable that when they are exposed to long explanations, few of it will be retained to relate to what will come next.

So to have the audience following the content it’s important to turn the information into few clusters easier to be remembered and linked along the whole process.

A complementary tip: Don’t use a lot of texts on presentation slides because it will compete with the oral information and make it harder for the audience to pay attention, a cognition process connected to memory, and to store the information coming from different channels at the same time.