Order Matters—But Not the Way You Think: How Serial Position Gets Misused

In this episode, we uncover how the order in which information is presented affects what users remember—and what they forget. From the “primacy effect” that gives early items a cognitive boost, to the “recency effect” that gives the last ones staying power, you'll learn how sequence can make or break a design.

We explore:

• Why we remember the first and last items in a list better than the middle ones
• Why many designers mistakenly apply memory principles to visual design when they should be focusing on attention
• The difference between designing for memory and designing for attention

Whether you're designing a pitch, a product tour, or just organizing content, understanding the serial position effect helps you make your message stick where it matters most.

Transcript

Welcome to The Design Psychologist, the show that helps you use psychology to design
better experiences. I'm Thomas Watkins, your guide to becoming a more powerful
psychology -informed designer. Have you ever sat through a long presentation and,
by the end, realized that you only remember the things that came at the very
beginning and the very end, or have you tried to write and deliver a speech to an
audience and wondered, "In what order should I put my key points? Should I lead
with the strongest idea or save it for last?" Well, it turns out that the order
that you present information actually does influence what people remember. Today's
episode is about memory and attention. Specifically, we're diving into the serial
position effect, which deals with how the order of information affects what people
remember. By understanding serial position effect, you'll gain practical strategies to
structure your content in a way that helps people walk away with the message you
want them to. Some of the questions we'll tackle here are, why do we remember the
first and last items in a list better than the middle ones? And what's the
difference between designing for memory versus designing for attention?
By the end of the episode, you'll have a clearer, more strategic approach to using
order and placement in your designs. This will help you guide your users and make
sure they come away with what matters most. So I'm going to read out a series of
numbers, and I want you to listen carefully and try to recite the whole series
after I'm finished reading them. I'll say go when I'm finished reading them to give
you the signal that it's time to try to recite them. Okay. 15 47 82 29 63 63,
91, 37, 58, 74,
22, 49, 10, go.
Okay, how did you do? Did you recall 15 or 47, or maybe did you recall 49 or 10?
If you remembered one of the beginning or ending numbers, then you did what's called
serial position effect. That's remembering something at the beginning or the ending
because the order of the number that you're trying to remember matters. So this is
a memory effect, but I wanna take some time today to talk about memory and
attention. So let's contextualize it like this. We have an estimated 11 million bits
of information per second entering us through our senses. So according to this
estimate, various stimuli hit our senses, our eyes, our ears, our nose, tongue,
and skin, and this is a continuous stream of information that's constantly hitting us
and only a small fraction of it gets to our brains. So of this 11 million bits
per second, our conscious mind is only aware of about 40 to 50 bits per second,
and only a tiny fraction of that is able to impact us or make an impression on
our neural networks in the form of something we call memory. So I want to take a
moment to appreciate the fact that we even know this kind of thing. I want to
break down memory and attention as research traditions. They don't come from one or
two magical studies. They come from long research traditions. I want to take a
moment to try to appreciate these a little bit. Imagine Herman Ebbinghaus, a pioneer
memory researcher, sitting at his desk in the 1800s in Germany. No computer or
elaborate laboratory tools, just a pencil, paper, and a clock. On his desk is a
list of nonsense syllables that he created. He uses nonsense syllables to avoid his
real memory of real words. He needs everything to be new here. He studies the list,
reciting, "Bick. Lud.
Path." Over and over, repeating it out loud until he believes he memorized it. Then
he pauses and waits, perhaps an hour, perhaps a day, before attempting to recall the
list. Each attempt to member brings frustration when certain syllables slip his mind.
Over time, he records that the longer he waits, the more syllables he forgets, and
he's able to plot this on a graph. Through this painstaking work, Ebbinghaus would
eventually discover the forgetting curve, showing how memory retention declines over
time, according to a mathematical formula, unless it's reinforced. His Military
dedication to this methodical work laid the foundation for an entire field of memory
research. On the other side of the world, also in the 1880s sits the father of
American psychology, William James, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He's writing the book,
The Principles of Psychology, which will cover almost every imaginable aspect of
psychology, but today he's focused on one particular concept, attention. Sitting in
his study, James watches the street below, observing how his mind flickers across
different sights and sounds. First his attention is drawn to a newspaper vendor, then
to the rumble of a carriage. And finally to the faint sound of conversation. With
each shift it feels as though his mind casts a spotlight, illuminating one object
while dimming the rest. This realization that attention acts as a spotlight
selectively focusing on one thing at a time becomes the foundation for his
revolutionary theory of attention. Back at his desk, James scribbles down his
thoughts. He understands now that attention is limited and selective, allowing us to
focus on what matters most while filtering out the noise of the world. This simple
yet powerful idea would go on to shape a study of attention in psychology, much
like Ebbinghaus' work had done for memory. William James' metaphor of attention as a
spotlight continues to guide how we think about focused distraction in the limits of
our mental resources. These two stories, these two legacies, kicked off research
traditions that expanded dramatically over the decades. Starting with memory,
researchers discovered many different conditions that either help or hurt our memory.
Fast forwarding to the '50s, George Miller famously discovered memory limitations with
the magic number seven. If you're not familiar with that idea, it's basically that
we can hold a predictably small amount of information in our heads for a short
period of time. In the late 1960s, Atkinson and Schifrin proposed a new way to
understand memory, where there are different components or types of memory in a
system of memories that all relay information to each other, starting with the
sensory system, then to a short -term memory store, then to a long -term memory
store. In the 1980s, Indole Tolving proposed that there are different types of memory
or knowledge, things like knowing a skill versus knowing a fact, were completely
different. And these aren't just ad hoc theories or hunches. These are ideas that
have reliable effects that show up repeatedly in experiments. And eventually, these
kinds of studies were able to be corroborated by advanced technology with brain
imaging techniques. In the past 25 Years or so, memory research has merged with
neuroscience, which gives us a much better idea of what's going on inside the mind.
Now switching over to attention, early models of attention treated attention like a
filter. In 1958, we had the model that described attention as a gate,
filtering out unnecessary information. According to this view, the purpose of attention
was to prevent sensory overload. Later, Anne Trisman comes along in 1964 and she
demonstrates that attention isn't just ignoring the stimuli that you're not paying
attention to, it's more so turning down the volume on the other stuff. A lot of
the 1980s and 90s research got into topics like divided attention and multitasking,
trying to figure out how people can handle simple tasks simultaneously. And just like
with memory research, in the modern era, attention is now deeply integrated with
neuroscience. So with both memory and attention being now integrated with advanced
neuroscience, we have a much more mature understanding of what's going on exactly
under the hood. So if all that in mind, let's get back to the core topic of
today. The serial position effect shows us that position matters. After each item
gets through your attention system, you've got to encode it in your memory, you've
got to retain it, then later retrieve it, recall it, or recognize it, and it turns
out that the order of the position matters. So, when we opened up with that
exercise where you're trying to remember a series of numbers, unless one of those
numbers was special to you or distinct for some reason, you probably remembered one
of the first few or one of the last few in the series, because position matters.
So this breaks down into two different effects. Remembering the first few is the
primacy effect. Remembering the last few is the recency effect. So these two effects
probably seem like they're kind of the same thing, but happening on two different
sides of the series, but they happen for two totally different reasons. The primacy
effect happens because your brain has more time to rehearse the initial items.
It might not feel like you're rehearsing those items, but you are in some way if
you're trying to remember them. The recency effect happens because those last items
are fresh in your short -term memory and they just happened and they had less time
to decay. And you forget everything in the middle because it's got interference and
competition going on between those items. So, one of the things that motivated me to
do this episode is that I've come across many well -meaning web designers who apply
Serial Position Effect to things like how objects or words or titles are laid out
on static web pages. So imagine that you're a web designer and you've got a set of
items to put on a page, maybe it's a list to select from, or maybe it's the
global navigation. And I see folks saying that you should put the important stuff on
the beginning and the end because of Serial Position Effect. But this gets to one
of the main points I want to make, which is that Serial Position Effect is a
memory phenomenon, not a visual attention phenomenon. For the page layout,
you want to focus on visual hierarchy and salience. Serial position effect just tells
us which items are more likely to be remembered when we're trying to remember them
from a list or a series. So I want to break down two different scenarios to make
sure that we understand this. I'll start with serial position effect and memory, but
then I'm going to talk about attention, which is where I think many people are
trying to apply serial position effect. So in scenario one, I want you to imagine
that you're presenting information to people and you really want them to remember
certain key things. And in scenario two, I want you to imagine that you're designing
the layout of a webpage and you want people to notice certain things.
Scenario 1 is about memory, and my examples will relate to Serial Position Effect.
Scenario 2 is about attention, and my examples will deal with a different set of
relevant effects. So here's some things to keep in mind if you want people to
remember certain things. If you present the information visually, rather than in an
audio stream, When the primacy effect is stronger, these early visual items are also
more influential on other items. If a person has to select something or make a
choice right after the presentation, then the recency effect will be stronger. If you
present items quickly, this makes the primacy effect weaker because you have less
time to encode that material in your memory. If you present items slowly,
the primacy effect is stronger. On the other hand, the recency effect is not
influenced by speed because it comes at the end anyway and it's not facing the same
interference as the earlier items. However, the recency effect is strongly affected by
the passage of time. Now, there's a bunch of great ways to make people remember
things more, but right now we're just focusing on order and how the position of the
information affects our memory. So if you're giving a speech, for example, you might
place key points that you don't want people to forget at the beginning and /or the
end. If you're thinking about the flow through a website rather than the layout,
there's a order dimension to that, and placing a strong statement, for example,
at the first part of the experience and placing a strong call to action at the end
of the experience might make it more memorable. Or let's say you've designed a
training program, you might put important items toward the beginning of the course
and /or at the end. Depending on when and how people will be tested or some other
factors, order can have a good effect there too. So there's a bunch of ways you
can apply Serial Order effect for helping people remember certain things. Okay,
so let's go to our web design example. In this case, you want to think about the
flow of information. It's like William James' spotlight. Visual attention involves the
eyes darting around from one noticeable thing to the next. Items at the beginning of
something, at the beginning of a static webpage, are noticed more often. So that is
very similar to the primacy effect. But this is only because its position makes it
more noticeable. It's about visual hierarchy. Since the word or image is at the
beginning, it's the same location that we would start reading from. So it's just a
prominent spot and it's got nothing to do with serial position effect. Okay, so
let's walk through an example. You're a consultant who works with small businesses
and your website is trying to direct people's attention to the important things
Here's what we want to think about Size and scale on the front of your website You
write in big letters grow your business with expert consulting or something noticeable
like that and The size draws people's attention to what you want them to see
Beneath that, you might put smaller, less noticeable text for supporting information.
You are directing people's attention with size and relative scale of the important
items. Space and proximity. You put a little bit of space between your navigation
items, so you have services about us and testimonials separated with a little bit of
space. This way, it's more clear that each item is distinct and your eyes can jump
to them more efficiently. Typography. You deploy a whole typography system for your
headings and text. In large font, for example, you might say tailored strategies for
small businesses. But then you have subheadings that say our surfaces,
testimonials, and so on that are sized somewhere in the middle. And then the body
text is smaller, so this way when someone's looking around the screen, it's clear to
them what level of importance things are, what's grouped within what, and what they
should pay attention to. You're using design to guide people's attention in a smart
and effective way. So to wrap things up, today we explored how the Serial Position
effect impacts what people remember. It's the reason we're more likely to recall
items at the beginning of a list, the primacy effect, and the end of a list,
the recency effect. We're more likely to forget the content in the middle. That's
because the first items get more time for rehearsal, while the last items are still
fresh and short -term memory. The middle stuff is just sort of neglected by the
primacy and recency mechanisms. But we also clarified something crucial.
Memory and attention are not the same thing. Memory is about what we retain after
the experience. Attention, on the other hand, is about what we notice in the moment.
The serial position effect has an impact on memory because memory is shaped by order
and repetition. But the serial position effect does not have to do with attention.
Attention is guided by visual hierarchy and contrast and placement.
This is where many designers get tripped up. The serial position effect is a memory
phenomenon, not a visual attention principle. So placing important items at the start
and end of a webpage won't necessarily make them more noticeable. So what should we
focus on to create better designs? For one, to make information more memorable,
place it at the start and end. This is useful for things like onboarding sequences
or checkout processes or training courses. So to grab attention in a visual
interface, use size, color, topography, and other design principles to visually guide
people to what matters most. And to make content more engaging, consider things like
separating it into sections. To prevent information overload, guide people step -by
-step through their journey. So to sum up, order Matters, but it matters differently
for attention and memory. When we design with both in mind, we can create
experiences that users not only grab onto, but also take with them.