Serial Position Effect: First and Last Items Are Remembered Best
The serial position effect makes us remember the first and last items in a list better than the middle ones. What it means for menus, lists, and messages.
What is the serial position effect?
Imagine someone reads you a list of ten words and then asks you to repeat them. You will most likely remember the first and last ones well, and lose some from the middle. That U-shaped pattern is the serial position effect.
LogRocket describes it as two effects combined. Primacy depends on long-term memory and weakens when the series is longer or shown for less time. Recency depends on working memory: the last items are still “fresh” when someone finishes reading the list, and the effect weakens if time passes before recall or there are distractions (LogRocket, “Serial position effect in UX design”).
The effect was studied with word lists in the lab. Laws of UX credits Hermann Ebbinghaus with coining the term, after he observed it in his own memory in the 19th century. Later, Bennett Murdock (1962) tested lists of 10 to 40 words, according to LogRocket. Glanzer and Cunitz (1966) found that giving more time per word improved recall at the start and middle of the list, and that counting for 30 seconds before recall made the recency effect disappear completely (Simply Psychology, “Primacy and recency”).
Why should a designer care?
Because almost every interface is a list: navigation menus, tabs, the options in a picker, pricing plans, steps in a process. If the option that matters most sits in the middle, it is more likely to be overlooked or forgotten before a decision is made.
Laws of UX turns this into a practical recommendation: placing less important items in the middle of a list can help, and key actions are best placed at the ends of a navigation (Laws of UX, “Serial Position Effect”).
This doesn’t mean everything must go first or last. It means position is a design decision, not an accident. When you review a menu or a list, ask which items ended up in the middle by inertia and which ones sit at an edge because someone decided so.
How does it apply in practice?
- Navigation menus. Put the main sections at the start or end, and the secondary ones in the middle. If people always look for a section, don’t bury it in the middle of a long menu.
- Pricing plans. LogRocket recommends putting decision-critical information, such as the product name, price, and call to action, near the beginning or end of the message rather than in the middle.
- Forms and steps. If a question or a condition matters (a cost, a permission), don’t bury it in the middle of a long series. Put it at the start or right before confirming. This is a reasonable application of the effect, not a result measured on forms.
- Long lists. Split content into groups and show only what is needed at each moment. Hick’s law explains why fewer options speed up a decision, which reduces how much people depend on memory.
Example
Illustrative example: a banking app has a bottom menu with five options: “Home”, “Payments”, “Cards”, “Help”, and “Settings”. The two most-used options, “Payments” and “Cards”, sit in the middle. The team moves them to the first and last positions, and “Help” moves to the center, because almost nobody uses it daily. Before changing anything, the team measures how long a few people take to find “Payments” in a short test. After the change, they run the same test. If the time drops, position mattered.
When NOT to rely on this effect
- For decisions that depend on long-term memory. Lab lists are isolated words. In a real product, people use navigation with visual context, icons, and search.
- When the list is short. With two or three options, position matters very little.
- When visual hierarchy already solves the problem. A large button in the middle competes with position. Check visual hierarchy first.
- When priority changes per user. A personalized menu can put first what each person uses. A fixed order stops being the best choice there.
Common mistakes
- Treating the effect as a rule that guarantees the user remembers something.
- Always putting the most important item first without thinking about the rest of the list.
- Building lists of more than ten options without grouping.
- Applying the effect to menus without testing with real people.
- Changing the order of a menu that users have already memorized without warning them.
How to start tomorrow
Open your product’s main menu and note three things: which option people use most, where it sits, and how many options there are. If the main option is in the middle and the menu has more than seven items, try a small change: move one option to an edge and group the secondary ones. Then measure how long people take to find the main option, with and without the change.
If the psychology behind these decisions interests you, the page on cognitive biases in UX complements this concept. And if list length is the real concern, read about cognitive load.