The Peak-End Rule in Design: What We Take Away

What shapes the memory of an experience, and how can designers use that insight to create better, more human-centered products?

Design more memorable and emotionally resonant experiences by understanding how people actually remember what they go through. It turns out we do not remember experiences by their length, but by their intensity and how they end.

By uncovering the psychological principle known as the peak-end rule, you will learn how to shape experiences that stand out in people’s minds, leading to better outcomes and more impactful design. 

WHAT WE COVER IN THIS EPISODE

• Why do we forget most of what we live through?
• What is the peak-end rule, and how does it influence memory?
• Why do people sometimes prefer longer discomfort over shorter pain?
• Should designers focus on the peaks and endings of an experience instead of the whole journey?
• Which types of experiences are a poor fit for the peak-end rule?
• How do memory and actual experience compare when it comes to decision-making?
• What are the two different selves described in happiness research, and how do they shape our reactions? 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The peak-end rule suggests we remember the most intense moment and the ending of an experience. Most of the rest fades from memory.
• Designers cannot control every moment, but they can influence how an experience is remembered.
• This principle is especially helpful when designing uncomfortable or tedious processes. A well-placed positive moment or thoughtful ending can shift how the whole experience is recalled.
• Duration neglect means people do not remember how long something lasted, only how it felt at key moments.
• The remembering self often outweighs the experiencing self when people decide whether to repeat an experience.
• Linear experiences like onboarding flows or customer service calls are ideal candidates for applying the peak-end rule. More complex or non-linear experiences, such as websites or productivity apps, may require different strategies.

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Transcript

Welcome to The Design Psychologist, the show that helps you use psychology to design
better experiences. I'm Thomas Watkins, your guide to becoming a more powerful
psychology -informed designer. Imagine you've come back from vacation and you had a
great time and you have a few memories that stand out. you recall the breathtaking
view of the sunset that one evening. And you remember a fun activity with your
friends where one of your friends fell and everyone laughed. And you remember the
food and the jokes that were told at the last dinner. But you only remember a few
things. You have forgotten the vast majority of the experience. Now that might come
off as hard to believe. You might say that you remember all of the experiences or
many of the ones from your trips and vacations. But the research tells us that if
you gather up all of those memories and you add up all the time from them
together, they only account for an incredibly small fraction of the total time you
spent there. So why do we remember the way we do? Well, there's a lot to that
answer, and we'll get into one idea today, and that idea is that we often remember
the most intense moment of an experience, the peak, and we often remember how it
all wrapped up, the end. This is due to a psychological phenomenon known as peak
end rule. It explains why we tend to remember the most intense moment of an
experience and how it ends while forgetting almost everything in between. In this
episode, we'll explore how understanding the peak end rule can help us leverage the
psychology of memory and experiences to create better designs. We'll dive into some
fascinating questions like why in experiments might people actually prefer longer
durations of discomfort over shorter durations? When it comes to decision -making,
which is more important, the memory of an experience or the actual experience itself,
and is a good design strategy to focus on just the peaks and the ends of the
experience rather than the whole thing. And what are the two different selves we
sometimes hear about in happiness research? By the end of this episode, you'll have
powerful insights on how to design not just good experiences, but memorable ones.
Let's explore how a little extra attention to peaks and endings can elevate the
entire experience for the people you designed for. Imagine this. It's the early 1990s
and you're sitting in a quiet laboratory at Princeton University. In front of you is
a container filled with cold water. The researcher walks over and instructs you to
insert one of your hands inside the container. The water feels cold and you're
supposed to keep your hand in the container and not take it out. After the first
10 seconds, you can tell that this is gonna be really uncomfortable. As 20 seconds
pass, you can feel the heat from your hands vanishing through your fingertips. After
45 seconds, your hand is past comfortable and is starting to feel pain. Finally at
60 seconds, the researcher instructs you to remove your hand from the container. A
few minutes passes, giving your hand a chance to warm back up and return to a
normal temperature. And now the researcher instructs you to plunge your hand back
into the cold water. Your hand goes through the same cycle of discomfort, but this
time at the 60 second mark, You don't get to pull your hand out. You have to keep
it submerged. Only the water gets slightly less cold by just two degrees.
So your hand is still very uncomfortable, but it's slightly less uncomfortable than
the first time. Now, depending on your random luck that day, you would either get
the 60 -second trial first followed by the 90 -second trial or you would get the
opposite, the 90 second trial first, followed by the 60 second trial. Following these
trials where you've dunked your hand in the water twice, the researcher asks you,
which trial would you rather repeat? And interestingly, given the choice between the
90 seconds of discomfort versus the 60 seconds of discomfort, people tend to choose
the longer trial, 90 seconds of discomfort, rather than the shorter option. Now,
why would people rather choose the longer period of discomfort? Remember, the 90
-second trial wasn't warm water for the last 30 seconds. It was still uncomfortably
cold. It was just 2 degrees less cold. This means that the participants were
objectively experiencing greater discomfort in the 90 -second trial.
Yet, that was the trial that they would choose to repeat, given the opportunity.
This study came from Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues. Daniel Kahneman was a world
-famous cognitive psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his immense
contributions to the understanding of human behavior. He was specifically very good at
showing where cognitive psychology helps us understand economics. Him,
and in this first study, his colleague Barbara Fredrickson, another prominent
psychologist, constructed a very important idea. This cold water study would lead to
what would be known as the peak end rule. The peak end rule, as the name implies,
highlights two parts of an experience. Some kind of peak of the experience and the
end of the experience. The peak sometimes could be emotional, but in this case it's
more physiological and sensory. In the cold water experiment, the peaks of each trial
were equally bad, but one was followed by a slightly less bad ending.
But wait, the 90 -second trial had more pain, so shouldn't that count for something?
And the answer to that question turns out to be no, it does not count. And that's
because of a phenomenon known as duration neglect. It turns out that we forget or
don't care about the vast majority of an experience when we're evaluating past
events. And we'll get back to the reason why in a little bit, but let's first
think about some examples of the peak end rule. Imagine that you waited in a long
line at an amusement park and the wait was not enjoyable, But then you finally got
on the ride and it was very exciting. That's the peak. And then the ride ended
with a smooth stop and you and everyone else you're with are all laughing and
talking about how crazy the ride was. That's the ending. Or imagine that you're
dealing with a very frustrating issue and you call customer service to get it
resolved. You're on the phone waiting for an answer and you don't actually believe
that the issue will get resolved and you're becoming angry, but then the
representative answer is and is very helpful and they resolve your issue. That's the
peak. And then the call finishes very nicely. That's the ending. In those examples,
you might very well disregard the long waiting times if the peak and the end were
good enough. You might not even remember the weight because of duration neglect. The
duration neglect concept gained even more credibility and support when Kahneman and
his colleagues studied the peak end effect again in 1996. This time,
it was with a painful medical procedure. Two groups of people underwent colonoscopies
with two different medical procedures. One procedure was much longer and patients
experienced more pain. However, it had a better ending. Just like with the cold
water experiment, patients reported preferring the longer colonoscopy that had the
better ending. The peak end rule turns out to reveal some very important things
about how we remember and evaluate past events. Now, to make sure that we don't
misapply this concept or oversimplify it, let's take some time to take a deeper look
into this phenomenon and why it happens. Kahneman wrote and spoke extensively about
happiness. He frequently criticized the state of happiness research and contended that
researchers and theorists were getting it all wrong. To understand why, imagine that
you could either go on vacation for one or two weeks. Also imagine that in either
case, you will do the same exact number of memorable activities, and you will have
the same exact peak experience and the same exact ending. And let's say that for
the two week vacation, you'll just be sort of hanging out for an extra week, but
you won't do anything that's more memorable. Which one is the happier vacation? Now
according to Kahneman, there's two different correct answers to this, depending on
whether you're talking about the experiencing self or the remembering self. To your
experiencing self, the two -week vacation is much happier. You are experiencing an
extra week of relaxation. It's arguably better for your well -being and you are
actively living out a greater level of happiness. But to your remembering self,
the one -week vacation and the two -week vacation are exactly the the same. Because
of duration neglect, you have the same memories and the same overall impression of
the whole vacation. The experiencing self is the one we're talking to when we ask
somebody, "How do you feel?" or "Are you enjoying yourself?" The remembering self is
the one we're talking to when we ask somebody, "How was your vacation?" According to
Kahneman, the Experiencing self is the one that lives life, while the remembering
self is the one that keeps score and maintains the story of your life. Kahneman
contended that much of the time when we plan our vacations, we're actually doing it
in service of the remembering self. This turns out to be extremely important for
happiness research because one type of happiness research investigates the happiness
people are experiencing in the now, and it's called happiness in the research.
And the other deals with the level of satisfaction people have as they reflect back
on their life's past events. And that's also called happiness in the research, but
they're not the same thing. Now, one caveat to insert here is that Kahneman was not
being literal when he talked about the two different selves, they're just two
different lenses for us to be able to think about and talk about happiness. So this
brings us to one critical question. Which of the two selves matters more? Are they
equal? It turns out, sadly, that the remembering self matters more when we're talking
about decision -making. People buy things and choose things based upon remembered
events. And even when they're thinking about the future, they're thinking about future
anticipated memories. When people evaluate past events or give a recommendation or
fill out a customer satisfaction survey, they're dealing with their remembering self.
So the peak end rule shows us that people tend to remember the most intense moments
and the final impressions of an experience. So according to that,
Doesn't that mean that we could just ignore the middle of the journey when we're
designing? Couldn't we just let the whole experience be lackluster as long as we're
tossing in one or two enjoyable experiences and ending on a positive note?
After all, people don't remember anything except for some positive peaks and a
positive ending, right? Well, here's the problem with that thought experiment. As
designers, we don't have complete control over what users end up remembering.
A study by Derek Wertz and colleagues in 2003 titled "What to Do on Spring Break?"
found that people tend to remember their experiences as more emotionally intense,
amplifying both highs and lows. And this is compared to what they reported feeling
at the time of the experience. So the memory is more important than the in the
moment experience and the user can pick anything as the experience to remember. So
in other words, users don't just remember what you designed for them to remember,
they bring their own lens to the experience. So what that means is we can't just
be cynical and assert a few positive moments and an otherwise frustrating experience.
We have to care about the whole experience. And the user might also pick their own
moment that is negative for them and that could be the highlight that they come
away with. So although we can strategically design those important highlights to shape
how people remember their experiences, we still have to ensure that we're creating a
consistently enjoyable journey. And it's also important not to oversimplify the peak
end rule and to assume that this rule applies in all circumstances. It's a
psychological effect, and like most psychological effects, it must be considered in
context alongside other effects. For example, studies on a different effect called
negativity bias, show that people sometimes assign more weight to negative events.
So in essence, we don't want to neglect any part of the customer journey. The peak
end rule is all about memory and how we recall past memories rather than how we
felt during those experiences. It works retrospectively, meaning it shapes our
impressions after an experience has ended. It deals with the most intense moments,
which are the peaks, and how things conclude. Importantly, attitudes can be shaped by
influencing whether people remember the whole journey as positive or the whole journey
as negative, regardless to its overall duration.
So for the designers, let's think about how we apply this. The peak end rule
applies best to experiences that are straightforward and sequential,
like a customer service call or a medical procedure or a theme park ride,
where events unfold in a clear order. However, the peak end rule is less reliable
in experiences that are complex or non -linear. For example,
navigating a website or something that's a repetitive habit, like using a productivity
app. Some journeys are difficult to control in a precise manner. At beginning to end
experience, you kind of have more control over it. Versus something that's like non
-linear or everywhere, it's harder to pick beginnings, peaks, and endings. Consider
applying the peak end rule to an experience that's innately uncomfortable, maybe one
where the discomfort can't be avoided. In this case, you want to find opportunities
to insert pleasant moments and make sure that the experience has an overall positive
ending. The hope is that people will remember the more pleasant parts of the
experience and we can kind of think of this as reducing the amount of pain people
carry forward with them. Another thing to keep in mind is duration neglect. Much of
the actual time that actually elapses during this unpleasant or boring or uneventful
period can go unrecorded in our memories. By ensuring that we have the right peaks
and endings, we can help people come away with a better memory for that very
reason. For example, If customers have to endure a long wait time, consider inserting
a fun or pleasurable moment so that they remember that instead of the long wait
time. The peak end rule reminds us that people don't remember everything.
We remember the parts that stand out and how it all concluded. That gives us as
design psychologists a meaningful opportunity. We can't script every lived experience,
but we can shape some of the echoes, a well -timed moment of relief, a thoughtful
gesture at the end of a difficult process. These small things can become what people
carry with them. Not because they were the most important parts of the experience,
but because they shaped how the experience impressed itself on someone's psyche,
and how they might feel in the future when facing something similar again.
And that's part of the meaningful impact of our work, designing not just what people
go through, but what they take with them.