Universal Principles of UX

10

First and last items are remembered most.

In 1885 German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus conducted memory experiments on himself to examine whether the position of an item in a list affected his ability to recall it. He discovered that it’s easier to remember items that are either at the beginning or at the end of a sequence. That’s because items that are at the beginning of a sequence are stored in our long-term memory, and items that are at the end of a sequence are stored in our short-term memory. Our brain doesn’t quite know what to do with the stuff that’s in the middle.

This bias is called the serial position effect and is vital when designing any kind of information online. If we need users to remember something in particular, or if ...