Interactive web features can help -- and hurt -- user’s memory

The researchers suggest that developers of e-commerce sites should carefully consider how they design their pages to make sure that important content is not ignored because it is separated from interactive tools. UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. Cool interactive web tools and neat features can boost a user's memory but they may also cause other content on the site to be less memorable, according to researchers. "Interactivity can enhance your cognitive capacity for information that is presented in an interactive fashion, but that enhancement of cognitive capacity doesn't translate into encoding of everything else on the page," said S. Shyam Sundar , Distinguished Professor of and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory. "In fact, it seems to be depriving the cognitive resources that you would have otherwise allocated to non-interactive content." In a study of how interaction influenced a user's memory on a website, people who browsed an e-commerce site had better recall of information presented by interactive tools, but remembered less about the content presented in sections where there were no such tools, said Sundar. Interactive web tools include scrolling, clicking, dragging, spinning and zooming functions.  The researchers suggest that developers of e-commerce sites should carefully consider how they design their pages to make sure that important content is not ignored because it is separated from interactive tools, said Sundar, who worked with Qian Xu, associate professor of , Elon University.