The Experiencing and Remembering Self in Designing User Experiences
A beautiful symphony has been going through your headphones for the past 20 minutes and you’ve enjoyed every bit of it. It’s like angels singing in your ears, it is the feeling of pure joy that flows through your body from listening to a wonderful piece of music. But then, suddenly and without warning, the oh-so sweet symphony is interrupted by a high-pitched screeching sound that ends the symphony in an unexpected and disappointing way. How will you remember this experience in the future?
If you look back at that pleasurable feeling you had listening to the symphony, you would have experienced 20 minutes of joy and only a few seconds of the screeching, dreadful sound. The whole experience has been ruined, even though the amount of joy clearly outweighs the few seconds spent in agony, you will most likely remember the overall experience as quite bad.
Daniel Kahneman, nobel prize winner and pioneering researcher within behavioral economics, describes this scene as a paradox between The Experiencing Self and The Remembering Self. The Experiencing Self is the one that is experiencing the emotional state in the moment while the remembering self is the memory of the experienced moment.
Studies show that there is a huge difference between The Experiencing and Remembering Self. A difference that has implications for how we think about and design user experiences. As the UX terminology would suggest, we are designing the experience — but, maybe even more important, we also design the memory of experience. What manifests as the experience in our users’ mind then, is the story they create about the experience. We memorize our experiences as stories and what defines stories are changes, significant moments and endings. Endings especially have a major impact on how we remember things, as described in the introduction to the article. Therefore, we need to carefully consider the events that define these significant moments for our users and make sure to turn them into a pleasurable experience that ends on a high note, rather than leaving them with an unsatisfying feeling as it will have great impact on their memory of using the product.
So how can this be applied to the design process? Identifying key events in our user experience, especially focusing on what is happening when a user ends a task, and turn them into enjoyable moments are key to create a memorable experience that will leave the users happy and hopefully make them return to your product again. MailChimp does it by high-fiving their users, when they have sent out a newsletter through their service, Google Inbox shows a nicely animated sun appear when you hit inbox zero. Small, but important features that affects the way users remember the experience.
The notion of The Remembering Self is also relevant to have in mind when users experience breakdowns in the user experience such as 404s and internal server errors. Breakdowns are unavoidable in digital product experiences, but as designers we can make sure to not make them resemble a screeching noise in an otherwise beautiful symphony. An example of this is Bloomberg’s use of humor when you reach their 404-page. Using a funny gif and providing the user with a link to go to the Home Page saves the user from being stuck with a bad experience.
I believe it is important to address theories like these in order to create a theoretical vocabulary for designers, that can be used to analyse our work. I believe we should establish a closer tie between academia and design practice as I believe it can create a lot of value that will make us better designers.
After reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman I was surprised by how much of the book was applicable to design and how well it establishes relevant design theories derived from empirical studies on behavior. It takes a deep dive into the human mind on how we make decisions — sometimes in the most illogical ways. I would recommend all designers to read it as it will give you a theoretical understanding and toolset that can be applied to understand users better.
I’m Simon Lind a digital designer based in Copenhagen, Denmark. I am interested in exploring technology and create digital products and experiences that make people’s life better. Currently, I am the product lead and co-founder at Peergrade while writing my thesis on leveraging behavioral economics to motivate students.
