Interfaces with Good Aftertastes: Hacking People’s Memory
Here’s the experiment:
Sit someone down in your best headphones and play them (A) 4 seconds of horrendous and loud noise, and (B) The exact same thing but followed by the same noise just not as loud. They’ve now listened to two rather discomforting segments, one of which was 4 seconds long, and the other of which was 8 seconds long.
Now ask them which of the two sounds they’d rather hear again. Rationally, they’d choose A — choice B is the same amount of discomfort plus some extra discomfort thrown in for free. It’s a no-brainer. On average, though, people will opt to listen to noise B. Even though it’s objectively worse.
If you’ve ever wanted to prove your significant other is acting irrationally, you’ve now got the experiment to show it.
Why do people choose an objectively worse option? Because we view our experiences through the subjective lens of memory. The noise may be objectively worse, but it’s subjectively better.
To understand why that’s the case, we have to look at how memory works. There’s just too much information to remember about the world we experience, and so to compensate our memory compresses memories down to their essentials. It throws almost all of our experiences and sensory perceptions away. Sometimes our brain doesn’t choose the “right” essentials to keep. Remembering is fundamentally lossy. And that can be exploited.
The two most important factors that influences how much we remember liking an experience are (1) it’s largest extreme and (2) how it ends. It’s called the peak-end algorithm. It’s why if a concert gets off to a rocky twenty-minute start but ends strong you’ll leave happy, whereas if it starts strong but has a bad final ten minutes you’ll leave disappointed.
Back to the horrid-sound-through-the-headphone example. Both sounds have the same extremeness, but even thought the second is longer, it ends less gratingly. Thus, people prefer it. It’s a real-life demonstration of hacking the way our memory works.
That people’s preferences are dictated by the peak-end nature of memory has interface ramifications. Take the lowly and ubiquitous progress bar.
Suggestion: Change all progress bars in Firefox to use an easing function that automatically biases progress to appear slower at the beginning and faster at the end.
Naively, you’d expect it not to matter how the indicator proceeds: you have to wait the same amount to matter how it scrolls across the screen. In tests, it turns out that perceived speed and user satisfaction both go way up if the progress bar moves quickly at the end. When asked why, participants described feeling cheated when the progress bar started quickly and ended slowly, and that the program “knew what it was doing” when it front-loaded all the hard work and then went quickly at the end. Knowing that memory remembers via the peak-end algorithm, however, means we know why people greatly prefer progress bars that accelerate towards a finish: despite the same waiting time, the ending is better. It’s the aftertaste that matters.
A little bit of cognitive psychology goes a long way in interface design. Try to make your interfaces have a good aftertaste. You’ll have happier users. And have the satisfaction of knowing you hacked their brain.
Question: What’s your favorite specific interfaces (like the progress bar) can be improved by sweetening its aftertaste? One of mine is making loading throbbers/spinners spin faster over time. That way, if the user is waiting for a while, it feels like the computer is working over-time to finish whatever it’s doing.
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Frodo
Nature has this one figured out. Imagine if sex started with the orgasm. Oh, wait, that does happen to some guys.
The operators of fireworks shows also know to save the best for last.
Calvin Spealman
I can think of a few places to take advantage of this:
– Don’t show the page until the whole thing is rendered
– Don’t show the desktop on startup until all background work is done
– Count the number of files handled during a file copy dialog, and then spit out all the names quickly at the very end.
– Detect sluggish processing and display a “please be patient…” screen.
– Freeze screenshots of all open windows at shutdown, wait for everything to actually close, and then quickly remove the screenshots to look like everything suddenly closed cleanly and quickly.
– Be smarter about buffering video on bad connections
– Add sleep() calls randomly with a higher ratio in the morning
Jeroen Coumans
If you’re interested in more of the theory behind this, there’s a great TED presentation explaining this: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code.html
Julien Couvreur
Good post.
A few books that come to mind:
Dan Ariely’s “Predictably Irrational”, which illustrates many ways in which we are irrational.
Steven Seow’s, “Designing and Engineering Time”, which discusses the different dimensions of time perception and how to incorporate this analysis in UI design. He also has a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/time/
Julien Couvreur
-waiting on the phone for a representative. Some use a repeating voice (“your call is important to us, …”) instead of music, which leaves a bad aftertaste.
-on the other hand, customer lines which call you back once a representative is available waste less of you time.
bret
I would guess that people’s satisfaction with the front-loaded progress bar has more to do with setting an expectation and then exceeding it. From the initial velocity, they expect it to fill in 10 seconds. When the expected last 5 seconds end up only taking 2, their expectations have been exceeded, so they are pleased.
It’s possible that if all progress bars had an easing curve, people would acclimate to it, and the end rush would no longer be pleasingly unexpected.
Morton
I don’t know, adding this feature to firefox’s download progressbar seems like a bad idea for me. It may work as long as the users didn’t know but they would feel cheated if (or better when) they find out.
And additional most time I am happy if download is finish ’cause I already waited to get on with what ever I am currently doing..
I think it’s a bad thing on long waiting-periods (more than 10 minutes) but on fast things, where you sit in front of the screen waiting to finish progress, it will may give you a better feeling.
Maybe this is something to pack into a small addon for testing on users. May some project for MAOW in Berlin on 28th?
Moody Loner
Windows Vista seems to have extrapolated the concept of preloading with a horizontal throbber in the address bar of the folder opening or being searched. The perception of the throbbing being in the same direction to the end goal actually gives the user the illusion of search speed i.e. it looks like it is racing through the search criteria.
In my experience with providing user feedback, displaying the re-iterative information [folders, filenames etc] directly in the interface provides a distraction from the length of the search in real-time and provides the idea of speedyness.
max st john
Great article and a really interesting application of psychology to design.
I agree with Morton that things like the Firefox download progress bar aren’t candidates for this kind of approach – apart from the impracticality (given changing dl speeds etc), it would be too disingenuous and maybe even a bit patronising.
I think it’s producers of full-on flash-based sites that need to take this on board most – the front-loaded progress bar is the only possible way you’ll even start to reduce the irritation caused by a site that makes me wait for it to ‘load’…
Long
Aza, could you throw out a link to the original study on sound A versus sound B?
Luka Vida
It seems to me that Google Chrome uses this kind of progress icons on tabs. It spins slowly one way and after some time it changes direction and speeds up.
Eauxpie
Conversely, I’ve found that animating the user interface works best if you have a fast start combined with an ease out…essentially an exponential decay towards the target state. IMO, this has the psychological effect of being responsive without being jarring. If you were to anthromorphize the UI as butlers, this would be the equivalent of a crisp acknowledgment and exit, without slamming the door on the way out. I’ve seen this work great for animated scrolling as well.
I’m guessing this works for transitions that are short by leveraging the peak aspect of the peak-end algorithm.
anand
Hey i am a cognitive science student and i think the example is a little like devil’s advocate but yeah you have a point about the peak-end algorithm… i agree with you on that part atleast……
One example i can think of immediately is the page loading icon..the circling dots at the left corner of a tab…..
Mike Beltzner
See this study for a good analysis of various progress bar behaviours and their effect on perception of performance. Pretty interesting stuff.
Mike Beltzner
Oh, also, when Safari had the progress bar filling in behind the location bar, they did a fun thing where it looked like it was moving even when it was standing still (the edge would vibrate back and forth a pixel). You know this though, since you were the one who pointed it out.
It’s one of my favourite person-pacifiers.
Aza Raskin
@Long: The study is from Well-being: The foundations of hedonic psychology. I love that name :)
shawnee
What about reading a very interesting and well-written post, and seeing it *end* with a glaring grammatically incorrect sentence? “What’s your favorite specific interfaces (like the progress bar) can be improved by sweetening it’s aftertaste?” ;)
Aza Raskin
@shawnee You’ve got me there. Fixed :)
Rachel Bennett
This is definitely echoed in music. For example, in jazz solos, musicians will increase the speed of rhythmic figures and increase the intervals between notes until they just go insane at the end. And pieces of classical music often start unassuming and drab, but by the end, they have become triumphant and majestic (usually the character of music the listener craves).
Greg
Interesting story… Between IE4 and IE5 1/2 the frames from the spinning globe throbber animation were removed making the globe spin faster. This change caused a lot of people to think the browser was much faster because the time they spent waiting appeared to be flying by.
Magicians call this misdirection but it works.
Philipp
I pretty much liked the way the original Macintosh started up, showing the components being loaded in the bottom speeding up at the end (well, most of the time ;-).
Together with the hard drive clattering (and no fan, it’s an iMac G3, baby!) this really gave me the impression it’s accelerating during booting.
Also, the way it started presenting the final user interface (loading the wallpaper at first, then showing the icons on the desktop and finally displaying the menu) somehow felt like the “natural way” of doing this.
I disdain the (classic) spinning wheel for looking the same all the time and the progress bar (combined with a oh-so-smart percentage label) for it’s “getting stuck in the mud” feelingness for long tasks.
To finally come to your question: I kind of find it distracting when programmes are shutting down (saving config files etc.) and are _not_ indicating this to the user.
For example quitting Firefox after a long run is obviously taking some time but isn’t indicating this to the user in any way.
Obviously, a “FF is shutting down” window won’t do so how about doing it like the traditional Mac OS and display e.g. extension icons getting less and less as the FF keeps quitting?
Anders Rune Jensen
Rachel Bennett: Yeah and often used in concerts where the best tracks are played at the end. As for individual tracks then a track which is the perfect illustration of this is Blackwater Park by Opeth. The end is both the culmination of a great song and a great album. So it also goes for at least some progressive death metal :)
Nugget
Your progress bar sparked off something I noticed in a game (Guild Wars), and have wanted to copy since.
Their ‘progress bars’ do not speed up at the end (that I know of). However, they give the right side of the progress bar (the moving bar bit) a highlighty, ‘speedy’ sort of glow… and believe it or not, even when the bar is moving incredibly slowly (or not moving!) it helps in the perception of speed.
GW bars just ‘felt’ faster than say, World of Warcraft bars, which were exactly the same in functionality and did NOT have this kind of highlighting.
Additionally, no one would have to feel ‘tricked’… thoughts?
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Is impossible to attack the people’s mind in this way,. I suppose the real problem is made by the impossibility of real hacking.
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