Effects of serial position

Imagine your partner asks you to buy a list of groceries: milk, banana, cookies, pickles, whole wheat bread, cheese, and peanut butter. According to the serial position effect, you’re likely to remember the first (milk) and last (peanut butter) items but forget those in the middle, like pickles and whole wheat bread, unless you wrote them down.

This happens because we find it easier to remember the first and last items in a sequence. The first items are processed more easily, and the last items stick in our short-term memory.^[1] The middle items require more effort to recall because they are grouped together, making it harder for our brains to process.

In UX writing, position the most important information at the beginning or end of a list to ensure users remember it, and place less critical details in the middle. For example, place the most common settings at the top of the Settings page, where users expect them to be.