User Memory Design: How To Design For Experiences That Last
One of the many emotional design techniques — and my personal favorite — is to create moments of surprise by letting users make their own discoveries in a UI. When my coworkers and I created JamBells, a cooperative mobile web game, we added a secret to the list of playable songs (check it out on mobile and see if you can find it). Another example is Snapchat’s lenses, a killer feature that’s almost impossible to find in the UI without help. I recently spent an entire dinner with four other UX designers trying to figure out how to do a face swap. While it certainly was not usable in any conventional sense, we felt pretty cool when we finally figured it out.
For a designer, creating peak moments also means not being a perfectionist with small problems and learning to see the big picture. A few years ago, Don Norman talked about how he asked people to tell him about the thing they hate most about a trip to Disney World or a new iPhone. Everybody is always ready with some horror story about the lines at Disney World or the new operating system, but when he asked if they would recommend that thing to a friend, they almost always emphatically said yes!
At the end of the piece, Norman concludes with this advice: “Perfection is seldom worth the effort. So what if people have some problems… What matters is the total experience.”
