UX - why speed matters “The doorway effect”: Why walking through doors makes us forget, and why this is analogous to using the web. On the topic of flow, there’s an interesting article in Scientific American about why walking through a doorway makes us more forgetful. If you’ve ever walked into a room to do something, only to forget what you were there to do, you’ll find this interesting. It’s also relevant to online navigation, in my opinion. A team of researchers tested their hypothesis using “rooms” in computer games, virtual environments, and real-world environments, and found that the results were consistent: our memories are worse when we enter a new environment through a doorway. They call this, logically, “the doorway effect” and the Scientific American article sums it up pretty well: “…some forms of memory seem to be optimized to keep information ready-to-hand until its shelf life expires, and then purge that information in favor of new stuff. Radvansky and colleagues call this sort of memory representation an “event model,” and propose that walking through a doorway is a good time to purge your event models because whatever happened in the old room is likely to become less relevant now that you have changed venues. That thing in the box? Oh, that’s from what I was doing before I got here; we can forget all about that. Other changes may induce a purge as well: A friend knocks on the door, you finish the task you were working on, or your computer battery runs down and you have to plug in to recharge.” The noteworthy aspect of this study is that the doorway effect persists in computer simulations. The act of going from virtual room to room is directly analogous to the act of navigating from page to page. It’s easy to conclude that the visual stimulus of watching a page refresh could purge the previous page’s “event model”.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Jun 2013 06:11:39 +0000
Trending Topics
© 2015