How can we create digital products to help people remember better?

This is the question that Mark Zeh asked in his talk at the Interaction 23 conference. These are my key takeaways.

The challenge today is that people don’t know stuff anymore. We get worse at remembering things. This is a problem because, if we do not remember information, then it is not available when we need it, for example: in slow cognition, which is an important part of problem solving and having ideas; in group cognition, where we build up knowledge together with other people.

One cause for this is that today’s digital information systems focus on… The brain. Perfect memory. The individual isolated from their context or environment.

Because of this focus on brain, perfect memory and the individual, digital information systems work like this today:

• They get people to put in a lot of information into their digital devices, but don’t give a lot back. As a result, people don’t interact much with the information they stored.
• They use few retrieval cues and which focus only on the digital device. The smartphone screen is the single retrieval cue, upon which memories are mapped.
• They use few and outdated metaphors: information trees, pages, paper scroll.
• Conversations with data are very objective. They give an answer back – the answer (like chatGPT.) But this is not conversational, and not integrative. It does not build on the person’s knowledge.
• They provide generic themes/stories that don’t have meaning for the individual and how they see their memories

How people really remember:

• People think and learn with their whole body (not just their brain, but also hands, mouth, motion…). Physical and spatial interactions are part of memory creation and retrieval.
• People rely on metamemory. This is a memory of the memory, where we know where to find the information, but do not know the information itself. Often cannot retrieve this again, because we do not encode the information itself into our memory
• People are bad at remembering things. Even things that people encoded as memories, do fade over time. We forget older information if we don’t use it, if we learn something new on the same topic, or learn on the same retrieval cue (like our smartphone screen).
• People create memories / knowledge not only as individuals, but also in groups. We do work together as groups, and think as groups. Group cognition is an important aspect of memory and knowledge creation.
• Diverse retrieval cues help people remember: Narrative (Stories). Objects, images and rituals. Location and overview helps people see where everything is. Other people in group cognition.

Design implications: How can we design systems that help people remember better?

• Get people to transact more with the information they store: Create conversations with memories. Prompt memory. Communicate information back — My favorite example for this is the Readwise app, which gets my to review 5 quotes everyday, which I had previously saved from books and articles.
• Add tangibility with the physical world: Design interactions beyond the digital device, and get people to do something in the physical world. — One example that Mark shared in his talk was the see-and-do-imitation: watch YouTube on how to play a guitar and copy that. But it can also be simple doodling on paper.
• Metaphors of space: Use different metaphors for how people address space. Go beyond the page or paper scroll. Interactions are N dimensional. — Example: people look for landmarks, overview, adjacencies. (There is no reason that everything is organized in trees.)
• Build a personal theme or story for people, because a narrative is easy to remember. But, generic stories don’t work. What makes sense to one person doesn’t for another. We need to show both ways to people with the same data so that it makes sense to them.
• Design for group interactions to enable exploration of information and building knowledge together.

What to you think? How are you designing experiences that help people build memories and remember them?

Photo by Ian Dooley on Unsplash