Disclosed are methods for arranging list elements (e.g., results returned by a user search) according to anticipated “impact.” Thumbnails of the top elements are displayed on a screen of the user's device, with the size of each thumbnail related to that result's anticipated impact. In some embodiments, the arrangement of these thumbnails on the display screen is also based on the anticipated impacts with larger thumbnails placed near the center of the screen and successively smaller thumbnails arranged farther away. Different embodiments may calculate the anticipated impacts differently. The impact can be related to the rank order as assigned by a search engine. Any information about the user's current situation can go into the calculation of the anticipated impact. When the user is searching for information, longer video results may be assigned a larger anticipated impact because they are more likely to contain the wanted information.