Message Order Importance

Typically when building pages we see clients put together a list of links or information and put their most important information at the top, and the least important information at the bottom. This is a common practice for many sites, but Primacy and Recency Effects may cause a need to re-think this strategy.

A Primacy Effect is the chance that an item shown earlier in a message has a higher chance of being remembered by a receiver.

A Recency Effect is the change that an items at the end of a message has a higher chance of being remembered by a receiver.

Both Primacy and Recency Effects come into play, depending on a message receivers involvement with the message. Highly involved receivers (those who are actively reading your content) tend toward putting more weight on items earlier in the message. Low involvement receivers (those who are not processing the information in an active manner) will put more weight on items at the end of a message.

A quick overview of "Primacy and Recency Effects on Clicking Behavior" from the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication:

Testing random order lists, where every item is the list is shown in each position over time, the most clicked item was the first in the list, while the second most clicked item was the last. This suggests that while some viewers are centrally processing the message, which leads to the primacy effect, there are slightly fewer people viewing peripherally, which leads to the Recency Effect.

This would suggest that when creating content, and choosing the order of the message/links/list that your most important information should be listed first, but that your least important should not be last. The last part of the message should be something that holds importance to receivers and can influence in a positive manner.

An example of this would be to perhaps not only put your main navigation across the top of your web site, but also to repeat that navigation at the bottom of the page to influence peripheral receivers to navigate the site.