How to design a customer memory

What if we’ve got experience design all wrong?

So much time and energy goes into crafting better experiences, what if we need to spend more time thinking about how we can craft better memories instead?

Experience design is like designing for goldfish.

Daniel Kahneman describes the concept of two different states of ‘you’. The Experiencing self and the Remembering self.

The Experiencing Self is concerned with a 300 millisecond slice of reality we like to call “now”. Her role is pretty much taking in, and experiencing, sensory data. With the occasional reaction to perceived danger.

Don’t get me wrong, if we deliver a bad sensory experience here we’ve got problems. But the reality is, the experiencing self isn’t the person who’s deciding whether she will buy your products or services again and she’s definitely not the one who’s writing reviews about you online.

The Remembering Self on the other hand has a different task. The remembering self has to construct stories about what’s happened, what’s happening and what’s going to happen. And in doing this, she tends to use a very skewed sample of the truth.

The remembering self uses all sorts of mental shortcuts to construct those stories and understanding them could be the key to shaping how your customers think and talk about the experience you craft.

What colonoscopy can teach us about customer experience.

My hero Danny Kahneman describes a wonderful experiment about how colonoscopy patients remember their proceedures.

They found that patients whose experience ended quickly and abruptly tended to remember their procedure as more painful and distressing when compared to patients who’s procedure lasted longer, but ended less abruptly and ‘faded out’ (by leaving the tube in for a couple of minutes extra).

What’s strange about this is it highlights a conflict between our two ‘selves’. The Experiencing Self had a measurably worse time (the pain lasted longer) whereas the Remembering Self remembered it much less negatively, even though it lasted longer.

Here’s a snippet of him talking about this experiment.

So what’s going on here?

Welcome to Peak-End Theory.

One of the mental shortcuts the Remembering Self takes when constructing stories about experiences is known as “Peak-End Rule”.

In a nutshell, when we reflect on an experience to evaluate it we don’t act logically and score every moment. We take the biggest departure from expectation (the peak) and we think about how the experience ended (the end) and we blend those two moments to form a quick and dirty opinion.

This has some pretty radical consequences for product and service design. Perhaps we don’t need to obsess about how to enhance the experience at every micro-moment. Maybe we just need to take a chapter in the story, figure out what peak we want to deliver and then make sure we end that chapter on a high.

How Heston Bluementhal uses Peak-End.

So I was lucky enough to go to the Fat Duck a few years back and, as expected, it was an exciting experience from start to finish. But I’m often asked what was the stand out moment?

The arrival ‘chapter’ was great — we were asked to arrive at 12:35 specifically and lo and behold, we were greeted by name. A lovely surprise and a great start to the experience and a very simple bit of trickery (no one else was arriving at that time of course).

The food was exceptional, but my expectations were already high going into it so the food wasn’t the ‘peak’.

For me the part that blew my mind was the 45 minutes I spent waiting on hold.

I’d heard the wait would be long and picked up that phone with a sense of dread. Rather than the usual “Your call is important to us” nonsense, I discovered a soothing voice reading Alice in Wonderland. Not only was this a big departure from expectation, it was actually pretty fun. By the time the receptionist picked up the phone I was a little annoyed because I was partway through a really good bit of the story.

So how do we use this to design memories?

When we’re working with clients to design service experiences we start by mapping out the customers’ expectation at each moment of their experience.

1. Start by chunking the experience into chapters.

Get your customers to do this for you — ask them to break down the experience into discrete chapters.

Some common chapters would be:

• Discover a need / committing to action
• Exploring possibilities
• Navigating choices
• Validating decisions
• Acquiring product / service
• On-boarding / experiencing / using the product or service
• Resolving problems
• Renewal / repurchase
• Leaving / defecting

Once you’ve identified the most important chapters it’s time to understand what it really feels like to be a customer.

2. Get out there, speak to customers and find out about their experience at each chapter.

Next you need to get out there and identify people when they are in that specific chapter and find out about their experience and expectations.

Some good questions to ask:

• What one word best sums up how you feel right now?
• What tasks do you need to complete?
• When things go wrong here, what usually happens?
• Which tasks here take the most time and effort?

Capture all this great insight and build a map to give your team a birds-eye view of customer expectations across every chapter.

3. Get your A-team together to review the findings and build a plan.

There are loads of ways of doing this but the most important thing is getting a cross-functional team together who can bring varied perspective to the table. This does two things: gets everyone on the same page about the right problems to solve and gives you a rounded view on how solutions could play out.

Some good questions to ask the team:

• What problems do customers really want us to solve?
• Where is there a low expectation that we could play with?
• What do we want our peak moment to be?
• How might we end strong?

The output of this session should be a series of ideas for change, your next job is prioritising these and weaving them together into a coherent story.

4. Get your customers to tell you which ideas are best.

By now you’ve probably come up with a whole bunch of great ideas. Some of them will be no-brainers and easy to implement (crack on with those). Other ideas will be bigger, more complex and these are the ones you need to get test.Harnessing the expertise of your team to create solutions is critical, but the only thing that really matters is what your customers think.

If we’ve got great ideas for a unique experience but maybe we’re a bit nervous in investing in a ‘risky idea’ — we usually move to a 5 day design sprint so we can test our assumptions quickly and cheaply. This lets us work out really quickly if we’re on the right track or if we need to try something else.

Follow up with them 10 days later and get them to score your concepts using the NPS score (“On a scale of 1–10, how likely are you to recommend product/service X to friends and family?”). This will help you judge which ideas generated the biggest impact on customer memory.

5. Build the Blueprint and make the change!

You’ve mapped out the journey, identified your Peak and you know how you’re going to end strong. You’ve brought together your A-team to come up with ideas and you’ve tested your best ones with your customers.

You’ve now got a validated roadmap for your customer experience that you can implement with confidence: one that focuses on designing for the Remembering Self, rather than just the Experiencing Self.

Congratulations, you just designed a memory :)