Recognition is easy; Recall is hard?

Design theory involves the fundamentals and principles of creating visual communication and all types of art. It deals with how we see and perceive visual information and separates ideas of style, taste, and trend from the universal principles of aesthetics that are common to every person. This is important for people to understand the underworking of design that people use to get attention for example. The theory that I will be talking about is Recognition is easy; Recall is hard.

Define

This first started when I was assigned chapter nine out of the “Designing with the Mind in Mind” book by Jeff Johnson. Chapter nine was all about the design theory called Recognition is Easy; Recall is hard. I will go into more detail later but the purpose of this assignment was to figure out how to design a project that will show this theory off. Mainly to prove it right. Now there are multiple ways that this can be done to make it work. A poster could be made, maybe a game of some sort but first, we have to understand what the theory is before we get ahead of ourselves.

Research

The theory itself is that Recognition is hard; Recall is easy. This theory has to do primarily with neural patterns that are associated with faces, pictures, icons, etc that you see. This is split into two different types of remembering. These are as the name of the theory states, Recognition and Recall.

Recognition

This is the easiest of the two methods. Recognition is perception and long-term memory working together that assesses situations very quickly. Early hominids used this for survival purposes to tell if an animal was predator or prey The brain does not search through every person it knows to find out if they know who someone is. Memory corresponds to a pattern of neural activity extending over the entire brain. When we see a face we have not seen before we don’t spend a long time searching our brain for who they are. A new face stimulates a new pattern of neural activity that has not been seen before. There could also be a misrecognition where they look similar to someone you recognize but they are not. A misrecognition might trigger if the faces stimulate a similar neural activity.

Recall

This is the hardest of the two methods. Recall is long-term memory reactivating old neral patterns. This is like Recognition but it is with the use of long term memory rather than short term memory. This is harder to do because it can fail to recall all the correct information or neural triggers. People that have to recall what to do rather than recognize will often fail at what they are trying to do. This can be applied to computer applications for example. Now there are icons that are associated with the function of the application itself. Like a file folder icon looks like a folder to convey its function. If you had to recall what the function of an application was without the icon to convey its function you would fail to figure out what it does.

HMW

Now in this project, there is a step of questions we need to solve for it to be a success. These are called “How Might We” notes. The basic premise is that we ask ourselves questions on how to solve the problem of how to show that this theory is true. Here is the list of my “How Might We” (HMW) questions.

• HMW explain this idea in an illustration
• HMW activate the neural patterns for everybody and not just some people
• HMW better articulate the theory for better understanding
• HMW illustrate the theory correctly and also get the point across that it is the theory without a label
• HMW illustrate the theory of common things that are done with the brain that people don’t think about

Ideation

Crazy 8s

The next part of this process is sketching ideas that we could use to solve this problem. For the first part of this, I did what is called the Crazy 8s. This is a process of only spending a minute at a time on one single sketch or idea that pops into your head. This is far from final ideas but it helps get those ideas out quickly because you only have a certain amount of time to spend on each. This can be done with quick rough sketches or just simply a small sentence of the idea. This was my Crazy 8s for this project

These are the ideas I had for each one (Some are sort of similar):

1. Poster: Grid of pictures with people’s faces on them. The ones that you recognize quickly stand out more than the others.
2. Poster: A password entry page with a hint on the bottom
3. Guess the App matching game
4. Find the specific picture from a list
5. Matching picture to its file name (Meant to fail)
6. Guess if you know who this is (quick face match game)
7. Matching unpopular icons to their usage
8. Find what application does what

Refined Sketches

Now that this is done I moved on to refining some of those ideas. This is a process of taking at least two of those ideas and refining them more into ideas that you could share with someone in a professional setting for example. Here is what I have done.

Idea 1: Poster

Description: My first idea is a poster with different people’s faces on them. There will be rows of these pictures of people some people will know automatically and some who people have no idea who they are. The ones that people should know who they are will have a different color background behind the picture to show the significance and in an x-type pattern on the page. I will play with the people’s faces you don’t know in photoshop to make them distorted and change around colors to further emphasize you don’t know these people.

This is meant to show that your mind will figure out if you know someone in a split second with familiar neural patterns. The images of people that you don’t know your brain will automatically know if you don’t recognize this person just because it is not a familiar neural pattern. The brain does not need to search through everyone that you possibly know to come up with the solution.

Idea 2: Matching Game

Description: My next idea is a matching game. The point of the game is to pair the icon with the correct function of that icon. This will be done on flashcards cause that is the best paper I have at my house currently.

This is meant to show that you can figure out what an application does just on the design of the icon. For example, you know that google maps is a GPS application because it has a simple illustration of map features and a destination pin on it as well to further convey function.

I chose these two ideas because I felt like they were the realistic ideas that I had come up with that could still prove my theory. These ideas also were changed up a bit with some further recommendations from my other classmates. In the end, I used the matching game idea.

Prototype

Now that the idea is set I moved on to making a prototype for my idea. The difficult part of my idea was gathering the icons I would use for the matching game. I wanted to have a difficulty scale to the icons from easy, medium, and hard. Another thing I had to decide was to do a physical game on paper that is about index card size or on an online survey where people typed in what they thought was the function of the icons. With some thinking, I ended up going to the survey model because I thought it would be a clear picture of what the person was thinking without them choosing from a list of choices. Also with this, I can test more people without having to physically be there for them doing it. This removes stress from them having someone look at them make a wrong choice and just put down whatever they thought.

Test

Now comes the time to test the prototype with other people and see how they react to the game. My approach to doing this was to send out the survey to as many people as possible that I know would actually do it and also be serious about it. I also gave one of the games to someone in my house and had them do it while I watched them. Then after I asked the question of how they felt about the game. The people that I decided to test were from multiple age ranges. I had some in their 20s — 60s to get a reading for how other ages would react to this game and their results to compare.

Iterate

Now that the testing is done there are some changes that I would like to make the prototype. Some of the improvements that I would like to make change some of the icons. I feel like some of the icons are a little too hard to determine their function without having the device that uses this icon. Most people have an apple smartphone over an android one. To make this test for more of a broader audience I feel like I need to use more apple looking icons to android. You don’t want the game to be only for one audience you want it to be for all.

In the end, I think that I proved the theory very well with this matching game. It is not perfect by any means but with some more work and iterations, it can be something that is better than it is right now. The overall experience of going through this process is very enjoyable. It felt rewarding to get all the information and be able to teach this through a game. What I enjoyed learning the most was the neural aspect of this related to the design aspects. I always heard about this from others summarizing it to me but never looked into it with detail. I still need work but is on the right track.