Just finished reading Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler. The greatness of the book is its simplicity. Most of the principles are so obvious that we tend to forget during learning design. I’ll blog some gems collected from the book in non-sequential format. Here goes the first part:

Recognition Over Recall

People are better at recognizing things they have previously experienced than recalling those things from memory. It is easier to recognize things than recall them because recognition tasks provide memory cues that facilitate searching through memory.

Recognition memory is much easier to develop than recall memory. Recognition memory is attained through exposure, and does not necessarily involve any memory about origin, context or relevance. It is simply memory that something (sight, smell, touch) has been experienced before. Recall memory is attained through learning usually involving some combination of memorizing, practice, and application. Recognition memory is also retained for longer period of time than recall.

Early computers used command-line interface, which used recall memory for hundreds of commands. GUI eliminated the need to recall the commands by presenting them in menus.