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78 Chapter 3 Understanding users

Figure 3.4 Poor icon set. What
do you think the icons mean
and why are they so bad?

that information needs to be represented in an appropriate form to facilitate the
perception and recognition of its underlying meaning.
Memory involves recalling various kinds of knowledge that allow us to act ap-
propriately. It is very versatile, enabling us to do many things. For example, it al-
lows us to recognize someone's face, remember someone's name, recall when we
last met them and know what we said to them last. Simply, without memory we
would not be able to function.
It is not possible for us to remember everything that we see, hear, taste, smell,
or touch, nor would we want to, as our brains would get completely overloaded. A
filtering process is used to decide what information gets further processed and
memorized. This filtering process, however, is not without its problems. Often we