Memory Is More Important that Actuality

In the latest Interactions Magazine there is a piece by Don Norman on the tendency for people to minimize the bad and amplify the good when remembering an experience. From the article:

Terence Mitchell and Leigh Thompson identify three different aspects of an experience: “rosy projection,” “dampening,” and “rosy retrospection.”

• Rosy projection: “the tendency for people to anticipate events as more favorable and positive than they describe the experience at the time of its occurrence”;
• Dampening: “the tendency for people to minimize the favorability or pleasure of events they are currently experiencing”;
• Rosy retrospection: “the tendency for people to remember and recollect events they experience more fondly and positively than they evaluated them to be at the time of their occurrence."

This struck a chord in my memory, a couple actually. Doblin Group's Compelling Experiences framework (bottom of the page, PDF download) and Adaptive Path's The Long Wow approach to Customer Loyalty both start from a similar experience model. The thing that strikes me as novel about the Norman piece is not it's psychological underpinnings, but his advice for designers:

Design for memory. Exploit it. Make sure there are reminders of the good parts of the experience: Photographs, mementos, trinkets. Make sure the experience delights, whether it be the simple unfolding of a car’s cup holder or the band serenading departing cruise-ship customers. Accentuate the positive and it will overwhelm the negative.

It's difficult to accept the notion that there is something more important than the quality of the experience as it happens, but it's a compelling argument. To embrace this thinking, we need to put more focus on prototyping tools and techniques that allow us to enact experiences for people in addition to those which explain experiences to them. Then we need more analytical focus on the understanding the aftereffects of these experiences on the people who engage in them.

Full Article: Interactions Magazine

Labels: experience design