memory Articles & Videos

  • The Peak–End Rule: How Impressions Become Memories

    Cognitive biases change the way that we recall past events. The peak–end rule focuses our memories around the most intense moments of an experience and the way an experience ends.

  • Peak–End Rule: Use to Your Advantage

    Users largely judge their experience with your product or service on two data points: the peak and the end.

  • The Availability Heuristic

    People make decisions based on the information that is most readily available to them. Understanding how the availability heuristic works will help you design for the way people think.

  • UX Visualization Techniques Reduce Your Cognitive Load

    UX deliverables such as journey maps and affinity diagrams help designers visualize information, so they can be better understand and act on it.

  • Working Memory and External Memory

    Human working memory holds information relevant to the current task; a physical or virtual external memory can help in tasks with a high working-memory burden.

  • Psychology Makes You a Better UX Designer

    Understanding psychological processes like memory, information processing, and cognitive biases can help designers make better decisions.

  • The Power Law of Learning: Consistency vs. Innovation in User Interfaces

    Across many tasks, learning curves show an initial learning period, followed by a plateau of optimal efficiency.

  • How Chunking Helps Content Processing

    Chunking is a concept that originates from the field of cognitive psychology. UX professionals can break their text and multimedia content into smaller chunks to help users process, understand, and remember it better.

  • Priming and User Interfaces

    Exposure to a stimulus influences behavior in subsequent, possibly unrelated tasks. This is called priming; priming effects abound in usability and web design.

  • Help People Create Passwords That They Can Actually Remember

    Human memory studies can inform design so they help people remember passwords. This makes customers happy, saves money and time, and increases security.

  • Password Creation: 3 Ways To Make It Easier

    By making password requirements visible upfront, allowing users to unmask the password, and showing a strength meter, designers can improve the frustrating user experience of creating a password.

  • Short-Term Memory and Web Usability

    The human brain is not optimized for the abstract thinking and data memorization that websites often demand. Many usability guidelines are dictated by cognitive limitations.