Experience vs Memory: What It Means to Designers

Every designer’s ultimate goal is to create a product or service with the best user experience features . But when the users have a good experience, do they really remember it later on?
Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and founder of behavioural economics, explains in his Ted talk, that memory and experience are two different things. There is an experience self, who lives in the present and knows the present. There is also a remembering self that keeps some memories from experiences. And the remembering self is the one that keeps score, and maintains the story of our life.
In an old study that Kahneman ran, two patients who were under the same medical procedure, were asked to report on their pain every 60 seconds. As you can see in the chart, patient B clearly suffered more — the painful procedure was longer, meaning, every minute of pain that patient A had, patient B had, and more.

But how much did these patients think they suffered? Surprisingly, patient A had a much worse memory of the procedure than patient B. BECAUSE a very critical part of the story is how it ends. What defines a story in our memories are changes, significant moments and most importantly endings.
That means, as a designer investing on a good ending would be a great return on investment since it could generate returning customers and promoters of your service with good word of mouth. What actually brings back a customer is mostly the memory of the last experience. It’s like when you go to a restaurant and find a fly in your food but the restaurant staff’s apology and the free food offer will leave nothing but a good memory of the restaurant with you.
You still need a good UI in the registration phase to make the first moment of truth happen so that the customer is convinced to download your app and register. You also need to make the customer’s journey pleasant all the way to the end with your error free and good ecosystem design. A good persuasive copy throughout the steps is also necessary to ensure the customer’s commitment is escalated all through the second moment of truth. This is how you increase your conversion rate (convert visitors to users). That is all to create a good experience for the customer in his/her present BUT remember, you still need to make the experience memorable for them so that they come back.
Depending on the type of business, there are so many ways to create that memorable moment for the users. Below are a few examples:
- Surprising the users with a small reward on the checkout or subscription page.
- Making a fuss about fast delivery and a fancy or sustainable packaging — Woolworths plastic bag packaging on online shopping deliveries is not so impressive, is it?
- A personalised welcome email to the customer including all necessary information required for one’s record and a neat list of most frequent Q&As
