Why Memory Sequences Matter for Product Design

I want to go deeper on one of the core pieces of hierarchical thinking: memories. What follows is some recall fundamentals, the subconscious business we all experience without noticing, and a different way to look at how memory drives people to use a product.

First, what is a memory?

If you've never thought hard about this, it may have slipped past you: knowledge is memories connected together into a complex series of thought patterns. The more you focus on a subject, the more complex those connections get. That's all being knowledgeable really is.

More usefully for us: memories are stored in a sequence. It's why people build routines. It's why you can recite the alphabet forward without effort and not backward, unless you've practiced. And it's why people anticipate a specific series of steps when they shop online.

The Jeopardy player who broke everyone’s sequence

Remember Arthur Chu, the Jeopardy contestant whose mind games won him around $100,000? Part of why he won is that he broke the routine of how contestants answer. Most players pick a category and work down it until it's empty. Chu jumped erratically from category to category every time it was his turn to choose.

Why do contestants normally stay in a category until it's finished? It isn't only that they know the subject. It's that when memories are isolated to one subject, it's far easier to transition sequentially to the neighboring ones. Jump the way Chu did and you force everyone to re-acclimate their thinking. That costs them focus, and it costs them composure.

So how does that apply to product design?

The same reaction explains why people get so angry about unexpected product changes. You have a product your customers already know. You put them on a path, a specific series of steps to get something done. They stored that string in their head and recalled it over and over, which wore the groove deeper every time.

Change one small step in that sequence and it gives them pause. Pause usually converts to fear, or to anger. Why did this change? What is wrong with the company? What else did they touch?

Sometimes the change is genuinely better and people move past it and learn the product the way you intended. Sometimes it isn't better, and they leave. You can find out which one you have before you ship it, by testing the options and measuring the outcome: A/B if you have the traffic, deliberate testing if it's an internal application.

Memory symbols, and how people find their place again

Have you ever interrupted someone mid-sentence and watched them lose the thread? They almost always ask you to repeat part of what they were saying. Why? Because they had an anticipated sequence they were working through, and they're asking you for a memory symbol so they can pick the sequence back up.

Losing your page in a book is the same thing. Stories read in a sequence. When you thumb back and forth looking for your place, you're hunting a memory symbol. Go too far back and you recognize events as already-read. Too far forward and nothing has a frame of reference yet.

Which makes progress tracking more important than it looks

Progress tracking is one of the biggest quality-of-life improvements product design ever produced, and one of the cleanest examples of a memory symbol. A wizard, a saved draft, a step indicator: the symbol is the person’s stopping point. Surface it again and they can collect their thoughts and resume the sequence they were already running.

Build experiences that run on memory

Designers conform to common UI patterns for a reason. Frequency breeds acclimation. People learn a sequence and start expecting things to sit in familiar places.

Which is why creating a genuinely new pattern that works is one of the hardest things we do. It's also why iteration matters, because it's the only way to find out how intuitive your pattern really is. That process can burn a lot of time and a lot of somebody’s money. So how do you close the gap?

Focus on memory recall.

When pull-to-refresh arrived it was a brilliant play on memory. People already slid their thumb up and down to consume content. Using that same motion as the doorway to refresh was a perfect transition, and it formed a new connection: I consume and I retrieve new content with the same gesture.

To create new positive memories you need to make that kind of connection. Find the memory symbol. Find the association. Use it as the catalyst and test versions of it.

And when you test, watch hands. Notice where eyes go first. Watch what people try to do, not only what they do. All of it is a mind and a body acting out a sequence of memories. Work with that sequence instead of against it and you will turn up some genuinely good design.