Support Recall Instead of Recognition in UI Design

[This article was published as an April Fools' Day hoax. It does not contain real recommendations.]

Since 1994, one of the 10 usability heuristics has been that user-interface design should support recognition rather than recall. The argument used to be that it’s easier for people to recognize that something shown by the computer is what they want (say, a command in a menu) than to dredge out of memory the name of that something.

Today we are announcing that this guideline should be reversed for modern user-interface design. Now, recall is better than recognition. It’s not so bad to have to change one of our 10 heuristics after 28 years. 90% of the heuristics still remain valid, which is the same as we have found in past analyses of old usability guidelines.

Mostly, what’s good design remains the same decade after decade, but it’s reasonable that a guideline that refers to something as changeable as human memory can — and thus should — change.

Why is recall now preferable to recognition in user-interface design? Because users have changed.

Decades of good UX in which designers have followed our recommendations (including the one favoring recognition over recall) have trained users to not use their memory skills and have made them lazy. The result is people who are incapable to remember simple things like 8×9=72 or that Copenhagen is the capital of Denmark or that Ctrl-S saves a document.

Moreover, users are getting older, and we know from our research with seniors that, while there are many differences between old and young people, one of the most salient ones is that old people have weak memories. If you have never forgotten where you left the car keys, that proves one of two things: either you don’t own a car or you have not yet passed 50 years of age.

What can we do to fight the decay of memory proficiency and prevent an epidemic of memory loss? The answer is to force people to use their memory more in order to strengthen it. Exercising memory skills will help today’s young users preserve their memory abilities into old age and will also let older users retain whatever skills they have left.

Addressing the issue of memory degradation will not only serve humanity, but it will also be important for the world economy, since more and more workers are getting older. If we can help old employees remember better, we will add millions to the bottom lines of most companies. Thus, the new guideline is even more important for the design of intranets and complex enterprise applications.

The business benefits of the new guideline to design for recall also include:

• On job-listing sites, since companies prefer to hire smart applicants, we can screen out the stupid ones from the beginning by making sure that only users with strong memory skills can use the site.
• For luxury products, exclusivity is a major selling point, so ecommerce sites will benefit from preventing too many people from understanding the product line, by requiring users to remember all their choices rather than making options visible.
• Enhanced accessibility: the less we rely on showing things on the screen, the less it matters whether users can see the screen.

Design Guidelines to Promote Recall

Practical UX guidelines to emphasize recall and strengthen our users’ memory skills include:

• Refer to commands and options by codes, preferably numeric. For example, a banking site could use “1” for the most-common feature (e.g., to see an account statement), “2” for the second-most used (pay bills), and so forth. If, say, “3” is the command to transfer money from one account to another, then the accounts can be specified by further numbers: for example “1” would be the checking account and “2” the savings account. In this case, users could be allowed to type a shortcut, such as “312” to transfer money from the checking account to the savings account and “321” for a transfer the other way around. Note how this provides an elegant way to support heuristic #7, flexibility and efficiency of use. We can furthermore support heuristic #4 (consistency and standards) by using the same numbers as are used on the bank’s telephone-response system, resulting in greatly improved omnichannel experience.
• Inscrutable icons provide some of the same benefit as codes in user interfaces that want to emphasize visual appearance. For example, the following 6 icons are impossible to understand unless you remember what they stand for. (For the full effect of this guideline, you should design arbitrary icons and avoid resemblance icons. Even better, repurpose standard icons to denote completely unusual functionalities. Also, forget about the old UX guideline to supply labels for your icons because that helps much too much with recognition.)

  

• Tooltips should read You know what to do here. Using the same tooltip for all commands is a great way to save money on UX writing.
• For additional user assistance, provide a set of cue cards that flash on the screen for 3 seconds each before they start using the site or application: the cards allow you to explain 20 features in a single minute and would serve as a pleasant animated splash screen to revive users’ memories before they are allowed into the actual website.

Since we only just reversed the heuristic today, we don’t yet have enough research to provide a full set of design guidelines for strengthening users’ memory skills. However, prior research on working memory provides some ideas for further progress. For example, we know that distractor tasks reduce the number of slots available in working memory to support the primary task. To build on this finding, you could ask usability-study participants to remember 3 random digits while they use your design. If this degrades users’ performance, you have successfully designed a product that taxes people’s memory limitations, which means that it will be a perfect user experience to help people get better in the long run.

Happy April Fools’ Day — I hope I fooled you, at least for half of the article.

This article was simply published as a joke, but to take it seriously for a minute, you might reflect on where in the article you realized that it was a hoax. What claim was simply too outrageous? Maybe more important, why did you not realize that this was a fake earlier in the article? Could you be taken in by equally bad arguments presented in all earnestness by ill-informed participants in your design meetings?