Key takeaways
Put the most important items at the beginning and the end of lists and navigation.
The middle is the place for the least important items.
Origins
The pattern was first noticed in the nineteenth-century memory experiments of Hermann Ebbinghaus, and the classic U-shaped curve was shown in free-recall studies such as Bennet Murdock’s in 1962. It combines two effects: primacy, better recall of the first items, which have more time to be rehearsed, and recency, better recall of the last items, which are still fresh in short-term memory.
In practice
- Put the main actions at the far left and far right of a navigation bar.
- Open and close a presentation, an email or an onboarding with the points you want remembered.
- Keep lists short: the longer the list, the bigger the forgotten middle.
Further reading
- Serial Position Effect: How to Create Better User Interfaces — Euphemia Wong | Interaction Design Foundation
- The Serial Position Effect: Why ABC and XYZ Stand Out the Most Among All the Alphabets. — Abhishek Chakraborty | Medium.com
- Psychology in Design (Part 1) — Andri Budzinskiy | Medium.com
- Serial Position Effect on Wikipedia — Wikipedia
- Serial Position Effect on Laws of UX — Jon Yablonski
The illustration is our own, drawn after the idea of this law’s card in Laws of UX by Jon Yablonski.
