Week 4 — Memory and Forgetting
#universitydiaries
New things
New things I discovered this week and that I had never realized:
This week’s lecture was about memory and forgetting. I learned about the workings of the human memory. And about how our attention is limited and our memory is imperfect. I also gained more insight into how to design interactive systems that support the flaws in our attention and memory.
What I learned
This is what I learned about this week:
The difference between our short term and long term memories
- Short term memory can last from hours to even lifetimes.
- Long term memory can last from seconds to minutes. Long term memory can be further broken down into —
- Semantic long term memory stores facts and relationships.
- Episodic long term memory records past events.
- Procedural long term memory remembers action sequences.
Refrain from designing interfaces that require a user’s long term memory
Our short term memory can be seen as our working memory. The relationship between short term memory and long term memory is best understand with this illustration:
If you can imagine a dark warehouse (this is your long term memory) and the search lights (your short-term) are highlighting on specific items to make them clearer. For us to retrieve information from our long term memory storage requires heavy cognitive load. Our long term memory is also often error-prone and easily biased by many factor when retrieving. Because our intuitions are many times found in our long term memories, it is good UX practice to design consistent designs where users do not need to learn their way around a product. Presenting users with design patterns or icons that they can recognize from their previous usage improves usability. User do not need to learn from scratch how the system works because the familiar context of use helps users retrieve information from their memory.
The magical number 7, chunking and Hick’s Law
The magical number 7 and chunking are techniques that make is easier on user’s capacity for processing information (which is often limited). The magical number 7, plus or minus 2 (Miller’s Law) is usually the number of things one can remember. But the maximum working memory load is 4–5 things. For example when designing a navigation bar on a website, aim for 4–5 categories and do not go over the 7 categories. Another way to support memorization would be to chunk long numbers up for example in a mobile banking app. A chunk is a unit of information that is retrieved or saved in our memory.
Because card numbers are usually very long, the input field for the card number is, in this above example, chunked into parts to avoid mistyping by the user and for easy double checking. Another law is Hick’s law. Hick’s law which says, the more choices people get, the harder it is to make a choice. When there are too many options presented, users feel overwhelmed — their memory is overloaded with numbers bigger than their working memory can process.
This feeling if kind of like e.g. when visiting an XL supermarket chain where you spend more than you’d like deciding between 20 different butters because there is just so much choice. UX designers have to be able to balance giving the user all the necessary information without overloading their cognitive load. This is especially the challenging on e-commerce websites, which are often very laden with information.
Curious about
I wanted to know more about … and I found it (in literature, on YouTube, on TED talk, etc.):
I was curious about where to find UX best practices and common design patterns that are in use. As designers it’s great to have such resources noted down. This is what I found —
- Checklist Design — is a great visual resources for the best design practices and clear examples that are very easy to understand. The website also allows you to manually check each list item off as you refer to it with you design side by side.
- UI-Patterns — is an organized gallery with recurring user interface solutions that solve common design problems.
I also watched a video about recognition over recall because I didn’t quite understand the concept during the lectures.
Recognition vs. recall concerns itself with: “the more cues we have the easier it is to retrieve the right concept from memory”. When we try to recognize, more context-provided cues are needed. On the other hand when we try to recall, we tend to need fewer cues.
The example given in the video is a menu system in a word processor — an example of a recognition based user interface.The situation is that the user wishes to cross out a word i.e. “to strike-through” and is looking for the function to do that.
Before usage of icons, we had to recall the name of different formatting features. Recall is difficult and error prone. With iconography being a standard practice now, we are able to find and understand information better because it comes with a matching icon that provides a visual cue of the function of the feature and also helps us distinguish them from others.
Usage in UX design
This is how I can use … in experience design:
- Don’t make user have think too much — Because users have limited capacity for concentration, it is important to help users focus on the most important elements by creating good visual hierarchy. Visual hierarchy helps control how we deliver information. By making important to notice components (e.g. menu, call-to-action buttons, etc.) stand out from the rest, users can easily guide their focus towards those areas of an interface without much thinking. Visual hierarchy can be achieved by playing around with color and contrast, scale and grouping (proximity and common regions).
- Use recognizable patterns — Checklist Design and UI-Patterns are both great resources to double check commonly used UX and UI patterns. ReallyGoodUX, Mobbin, UX Archive, PageFlows are also great ones to keep bookmarked.
- Use icons and illustrations — Giving user hints and clues offers them quicker access to understanding the system and carrying out their intended action. Visual cues through use of icons and illustrations saves the user’s memory effort and makes the interface more contextually comprehensive.
