Pictures are faster than words

Visual acknowlege occurs in a special dedicated part of the brain. We can acknowledge information by the first impression faster than words.

From an extensive research in the field of neuroscience around visual perception and cognition, the solution is simple and effective: If image recognition is faster than reading, why not simply use pictures to identify contacts much faster? 

When working on the MKNote project, we added a thumbnial image to each note in note list. Thumbnail image next to note title and note summary helped users to quickly recognize the note they were looking for during browsing the note list. I as the user of MKNote as well, always spent time stiring at the list and don’t know what this note is unless I have a great memory or click into this note to check more note content.

And in Tradeshift Cloudscan product, we turned this concpet into an design solution that added company logo to search list when users selecting recipients or senders in Cloudscan, which might result faster and effective.