The Peak-End-Rule: How Customers Really Judge an Experience
We use heuristics
People collect many experiences throughout their days. How can you create one that stands out? Daniel Kahneman discovered that our brains use heuristics to pick out what’s important. Heuristics are a technique to create a shortcut to solving a problem, which produces a good enough solution (may not necessarily be the optimal one).
And since we cannot remember everything from experience, we focus on two moments:
The most intense one (the peak)
The end
This alone is enough for us to rate an experience.
How Uber deliberately shapes potentially negative peak moments
The article uses Uber’s way to deal with waiting time to describe the Peak-end rule. Waiting time causes quite a threat to destroying an experience. To avoid a potentially negative peak, Uber applies three additional principles to make it pleasant:
Idleness aversion: People are happier when they are busier, so they keep them occupied while waiting, e.g. let them walk to the Pool pick-up point, show them a timer, etc.
Operational transparency: Let your customers know what you’re doing behind the scene (e.g., provide information about how something is calculated), Uber provides transparency about price/route, etc.
Goal gradient effect: People are more motivated by how much is left to reach their target, rather than how far they have come (the reason why UX elements like progress bars are so popular), the reason why you can track your driver. Find more examples here.
Source: Goal Gradient Effect
Summing it up
The Peak-end Rule says that people judge an experience based on how they felt at its peak and its end, not the average of every moment of the experience.
For brands, this means customers will remember their whole experience based on only two moments — the best (or worst) part of their experience, and the end.
When designing experiences step, one has to be to distinguish the moments, causing a peak, and thinking about how to end an experience carefully.