Users Can Only Remember Gaps: How to Manage This
Recently I’ve read “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, a book marked as Psychology (Economic Psychology, particularly). It is difficult for me to judge or to analyze such a book that challenges the very idea of human “Rationalism” so I would like to express a few points I got out of it.
- What does it mean to be happy? Happiness is satisfaction depends on memory, which is notoriously unreliable. So-called “the remembering self” retrospectively rates an experience by the peak level of pain or pleasure in the course of the experience and doesn’t care about duration.
Translating into the Product Manager’s “language”:
Lena drives Uber about once a week. Usually, these trips are normal, give or take. The last time she ran into a boor-driver and could not get through to Uber Support. Lena writes a review in FB that she will never ride with Uber again and will switch to Uklon. Boor-driver and the lack of necessary support — the last and at the same time peak level of “pain” for Lena. It doesn’t matter to her that the service was OK before this trip. Lena turns her full attention to the last trip — that is her critical experience.
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.
- We don’t remember life as it really was. There are two Systems inside of us: the first one originating impressions and feelings (that is, what we are experiencing at the moment) and the second one constructing memories and thoughts. It is strange, but we accept only the second System, the first one is foreign to us.
- There is an illusion of focus — people focus on selected moments and ignore what happens during the rest of the time. Intense focusing on one task/thing/person makes us blind even to stimuli that attract our attention in normal life.
For instance, when evaluating our happiness generally, we often think about what easily comes to mind at this particular moment — which is what happens to us recently. If we got married or found a coin, we consider ourselves happier and more successful, and if we lost our wallets or got sick, we are less happy.
How to take this into consideration when developing products?
- Work on the peak level of pain experience and reduce its “peak”
For example, at McDonald’s they give you an ice cream if you stand in line for a long time.
Before making the Miro service unavailable due to some updates, the creators sent out notifications and turned on a “plate” right on the site that the site would be unavailable from … to….
During holidays when there are long queues, some of the employees of the “Nova Poshta” go directly to the queue instead of standing at the cash register. First, they serve all paid orders, then orders without delivery inspection, and only afterward all the rest. It helps to speed up employee’s work and reduce waiting time.
2. Try to make the final experience in the product as cool as possible (or the final experience in each session)
It might be hurt when you watch a cool movie and then find its end empty. Or when you can’t find how to export the file for 15 minutes that you made for 5 minutes. Or when the last lesson of an online course was postponed twice due to problems and then canceled. In a nutshell, minimize the possibility of frustration.
3. Ask for feedback at different times depending on the task
For example, if your ask for feedback in the process of product experience, you can find out the user’s impression when using the product. It helps to correct the pinpoint nuances in the product but doesn’t help to improve the overall experience.
If you ask for feedback after using the product, then you can learn about the latest impression, we may call it a “residual” experience. This is the experience that the user will tell their friends about. Such feedback helps to find out critical points and ways to fix them.
If it is important to get positive feedback, then you need to ask for it after a peak positive experience (a Customer Journey Map helps to determine such a moment). This technique is often used by mobile app creators to increase app store ranking. Users are asked to leave feedback immediately after they have received a positive experience with the product.
4. Remind user about the benefits
A user may simply forget how useful the product was for him. The moment he receives a letter about the end of the test period, he is likely focused on how much he will need to spend on your product. Not the best shopping context!
Honestly describe the user experience in this letter: it could be statistics (“you saved … time in a month, did…exercises and completed…projects”).
P.S. People used to identify themselves as rational, but more often they aren’t. Something is hidden in the depths of our consciousness that keeps tampering with our ‘rationality’. We almost consciously allow this to happen surrounding ourselves with illusions (are these horizontal lines identical in length?).
Because of illusions, people choose options that are unfavorable for them. The thing is that understanding these distortions does not give them the right to use them for profitable purposes. Vice versa, this understanding places a lot of responsibility on entrepreneurs. Product creators need to learn how to help people to make the best choices. I wonder, how is that even possible?
