Recall vs. Recognition
Showcasing a design theory in action
The world of design and the world of psychology go hand in hand because, ultimately, design is for people. Whether it’s designing for a product, brand, cause, or otherwise, the driving force is a goal that revolves around the actions, attitudes, or opinions of a target group of folks. Understanding how the mind works is a key tool up every designer’s sleeve to truly create an impactful end product. Designing with the Mind in Mind by Jeff Johnson is a simple guide that covers design theories that incorporate the mind into the design world with real-world examples of how this plays out. While Jeff outlines 15 different theories, I would like to focus on one: Recognition is Easy; Recall is Hard.
Recognition vs. Recall discusses the differences between the two and how they relate to the human brain. Recognition has been developed through our evolution, so it is a quick and seamless process for our brains. Recognition is both perception and long-term memory coming together. This rapid recognition was crucial for our ancestors to determine a friend or foe for survival. On the other hand, recall wasn’t crucial for survival, so we aren’t as apt to it. “Recall” is much harder because it involves reactivating neural patterns without any perceptual cues and requires efficient coordination and timing to be accurate and complete. With this difficulty and room for error, we have developed methods and technology to help aid in our recall.
Knowing how these functions work is crucial when designing user interfaces, so you can work with people’s minds to leverage the strength of recognition and compensate for recall limitations. The ease of recognition includes using imagery, thumbnails, or icons. There are still times when “recall” is necessary, such as searching for keywords. As a designer, you can impact recall for users by using consistent visual cues and styles across web pages to help users orient themselves quickly between websites. Or when looking for authentication information, they should be designed in a way to help support recall through things like password hints or biometric authentication. This is something that we see every day in common iconography that has been built into our system of understanding and draws upon recognition to know what it means.
Ideation
When I began ideation, I kept going back to this Spongebob episode where he forgot someone’s name, and we got a peak into his subconscious which showed a file room that eventually was set on fire because they couldn’t find the name right away. I felt like it was a really simple way to showcase the challenges of recall in an easily digestible format. I found that I kept going back to something with a storyline or illustrations through my ideation. I created a mind map of related terms where the idea of electricity and visual stimuli were reoccurring themes. Once I began sketching ideas for this concept, used the crazy 8’s style of conceptualizing with 1 minute per concept sketch. Through feedback and several ideations, I landed on the idea of a short children’s book to showcase the theory in action. This concept showcases the process of recall vs. recognition through a small anecdote of a fox trying to see if his friend, the owl knows the same bunny as him. The owl doesn’t put the pieces together until she visually recognizes the bunny, despite some prompting from the fox beforehand to help with the recall along the way.
Prototype
I placed this concept into a prototype to allow testing. I utilized a slideshow video that used transitions to create the illusion of flipping through the book for the prototype. To test this I conducted interviews with my target audience. The goal was to identify the success of the layout, font choice, art style, and general storyline. My participants were:
- Participant 1: Chris, a 57-year-old woman who is a career educator in public schools located in a farming community in Missouri.
- Participant 2: Erica, a 30-year-old stay-at-home mom with a newborn located in the small town of Ashland, OR.
- Participant 3: Emma, a 23-year-old teacher’s assistant to Pre-K students with a degree in Child psychology located in Portland, OR.
The results dictated that the book's format was as expected, and the art style appeased all three participants. The solutions needed were to address a continuity error in the storyline and to add an additional cue to the final scene to ensure the interpretation was as intended.
For me, the most challenging part of this process was during the sketching phase to come up with different ways to showcase this theory, as I kept returning to the same train of thought with a series of illustrations. I embraced this by creating a product that reflected this idea, and I’m happy with the result. I feel like this quick style of ideation will prepare me for real-world circumstances where clients are asking for demonstrations of the product that we have in mind. I learned different methods to pull and cull ideas, embracing a train of thought if it’s loud enough, and the value of input when having testers within the target audience.
