This week we examined the UX Law of Peak End Rule. Basically, this law can be summarised as how people judge an experience at how they felt at its peak and its end, rather than the total sum of the experience.
For example, if someone were to watch a film that was exceptionally good throughout but the ending of the film was terrible, they would remember the ending of the film, not the overall experience of the film, and may not recommend it to others.
However, if the same film had a terrible beginning, a mediocre middle, and a exceptional ending, or a film with an exceptional middle and a mediocre ending – people might recommend that film much higher.
What can we take away from this rule in terms of UX?
As designers, we should pay closer attention to the most intense moment and the end of the user journey. What happens at these moments can have a greater impact on the overall user experience, and as such, should be treated more carefully.
We should also better identify the moments where the application is most entertaining, helpful or valuable to the user. In other words, we should try and make the most important parts of our application as entertaining, helpful or interesting as possible.
And the negative experiences within the application should be kept to a minimum. The more tedious, frustrating or tiring the experience, even if they’re small – the higher the probability that the user will have a low opinion of the entire application.
Cognitive Bias
Cognitive biases are systematic errors in reasoning that influence our judgement and decisions, caused by a failure to consider all the relevant facts, take into account the influence of other biases, or correct for individual perceptions that are clouded by familiarity or emotion.
The peak end rule is a type of cognitive bias known as memory bias, where the most intense or memorable experiences tend to be the most influential. As designers it is up to us to take these things into account when creating our user interfaces.
