Time Perspectives of User Experience

In the March/April 2009 issue of Interactions (http://interactions.acm.org/content/?p=1226) Don Norman cites psychological evidence that events are judged differently before, during and after they happen:

• Folks tend to judge events as more positive when they anticipate them compared to when they actually occur (“Rosy projection”).
• Folks tend to rate events that they’re currently experiencing as less positive compared to when they anticipate or remember them (“Dampening”).
• Folks tend to judge events as more positive looking back compared to when they actually occurred (“Rosy retrospection”).

He adds another finding which is that in our memory positive things normally outweigh negative things.

Norman provides a couple of travel anecdotes to exemplify and substantiate these effects. I did my own verification on a recent trip to Europe. I traveled to Cologne, Germany. Being German, I was looking forward to staying a couple of days in my home country. So yes, the projection was definitely rosy. Because I remembered Norman’s article, I paid somewhat more attention on my experiences that I gained during my stay than I’d usually do.

Turns out that I’d not rate everything as great experiences: a terrible flight, jetlag, long work days (after all, when they call it a day in Europe, it’s just noon in the U.S.), etc. But there were nice experiences, too: being in one of Germany’s most attractive cities, meeting interesting people, drinking the local beer, etc. Looking back now after a couple of days, I consider this an awesome trip.

 

 

OK, so what’s the connection to user experience? In his article Norman argues that what counts is the memory of a user experience. He says:

“Design for memory. … We should not be devoting all of our time to providing a perfect experience. … Perfection is seldom worth the effort. So what if people have some problems with an application, a website, a product, or a service? What matters is the total experience. Furthermore, the actual experience is not as important as the way in which it is remembered.”

I think this is an interesting thought, yet I’m wondering if that should really be the message. The anecdotes from Norman and my own experience in Cologne can hardly be compared to a user interacting with, for example, an office application. The frequencies are very different. I fly maybe twice a year to Europe, it’s not really repetitive. I will hardly make the exact same bad experience several times. However, a user of a badly-designed office application may very well experience the same frustration over and over.

Assume (and you probably don’t have to stretch your brain for that) that this software features one glitch, maybe an meaningless pop-up dialog that keeps getting in the way. Since the outcome of the interaction is always the same and therefore can hardly be considered a highlight, I’d think that this user’s memory would more emphasize the frustration with the UX problem.

I have to work with a very weird time entry system that I’ve been using for a year now. I make the same bad experiences every time I use it and I cannot claim that my judgment is more positive in retrospect than while I work with it. In this case, the negative outweighs the positive.

In my opinion the psychological findings above apply for infrequent user experiences rather than for frequent ones. Like visiting a website for the first time in order to buy something. Using a software once a year to prepare your income tax statement. For these scenarios Norman’s argumentation makes sense to me. However, there are also situations that require an extra amount of design investment to boost a rare user experience during certain events. I’m thinking of event-triggered systems like those for controlling industrial production processes. Here, the user experience of rare events has to be designed with a lot of care to limit the risk of maloperation under pressure.

What do you think? Do you have examples of the different time perspectives and how they relate to user experience design?