  During our nearly constant use of digital devices, perhaps our most frequent
need is to visually identify icons representing our content and invoke the
actions to manipulate them. Almost since the inception of user interface design
in the 1970s, with rare exception it has become the tendency for programmers to
prescribe the arrangement these things in uniform rectilinear rows and columns.
This was imported from theories for print design and ultimately brought into
widespread practice for graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Whether consistent
rectilinearity actually does better than less rectilinear arrangements to
maximize selection efficiency has not been challenged on considerations of
speed or any other measure. In a series of four experiments, we explore how
alignment may in fact discourage easy recallability of screen object locations
and hence increase search intensity. A second objective is to present a
methodological model where we deliberately attempt to begin with psychophysical
cognitive evidence at the environmental schematic low end (beginning with
contextual cueing paradigm), then move progressively upwards in naturalism in
the experiments to something that approximates actual human work at the higher
end, all along attempting to keep one important environmental property
constant. Two experiments using contextual cueing paradigm confirm that
collinearly aligned arrays do not encourage recallability of location, while
noncollinear arrays appear to create traces that can be recalled automatically.
Two other experiments give further demonstration of explicit recollection and
location recall, showing that collinear arrangements may in fact induce
location recall errors to neighboring collinear objects. We discuss surrounding
theoretical, historical, and practical questions.
