Interfaces with Good Aftertastes: Hacking People’s Memory
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.
Aza Raskin
At first the idea of artificially engineering a “strong finish” to exploit the peak-end nature of human memory made me feel a little dirty. It’s kinda like lying, after all.
But on reflection it’s no different to making beautiful products over plain ones to exploit people’s natural forgiveness of the technical flaws in beautiful objects. People forgive beautiful-but-flawed software just as they forgive a beautiful-but-stupid hardbody. We’re jacking an emotional response, either way.
Yes, “hardbody” is my one American Psycho reference for the week.)