100 Things: Every Designer Needs to Know About People

19. Short-Term Memory is Limited

We’ve all experienced this moment: you’re on the phone and the person you’re talking to gives you the name and number of someone you need to call right away. You don’t have a pen or paper to write down the information, so you repeat the name and number over and over to help yourself remember them. You try to get off the phone quickly so you can make the call while the number is still running through your head. You may find that your memory isn’t very reliable in this situation.

Psychologists have many theories about how this type of memory works: some refer to it as short-term memory, others as working memory. In this chapter we’ll call this type of quick memory—the memory you need for less than a minute—working ...