Thanks for the memories
By: George Beverley
Tags: Memory, UX Research

Thanks For The Memories

Why do we remember some experiences more than others?

Bournemouth beach. First sighting of ‘Surfer Boy’.

I live a few miles from the beach in Bournemouth, Dorset which is on the South Coast of the UK.

Bournemouth boasts of its seven miles of sandy beaches. I’m biased, but it is a lovely place to live.

During the summer, tourists and foreign students flock to the town.

One summer a few years ago, my friend from London, Mark, came down to visit for the weekend.

Before the visit, I told him that you can surf down in Bournemouth. And the beaches are nice.

Saturday morning, Mark and I went out for breakfast on the beach. The sun was out, and the sky was blue — everything looked peachy.

We sat outside drinking coffee and admiring the view.

What happened next was like something out of The Truman Show…

A teenage chap on a bike came to a stop just in front of us on the promenade. He wore shorts and T-shirts and had a surfboard under his arm.

He placed his sunglasses on his head, stood the surfboard up against his bike and stared out to sea.

The palm trees in the foreground framed him perfectly.

It was a picture postcard moment.

Mark looked at the surfer. Nodded gently to himself and then asked me: ‘So, people really do surf down in Bournemouth?’

I smiled and replied: ‘Sometimes’.

As my friend took it all in. I looked at the surfer again. As an average middle-aged surfer myself, I noticed a few things about him and his gear:

NO wax on the surfboard

NO leash attached

NO wetsuit

He was staring out to a sea with NO waves.

The reality of UK surfing is, if you want waves, you surf during the winter.

If you surf Bournemouth, it’s normally either side of the pier which protects you from the wind. Most of the time it’s cold, grey, windy and wet days.

You need a leash, some wax, and a wetsuit.

But that reality couldn’t be further from the image that was etched onto my friend’s memory.

After a minute or two posing, the surfer placed his sunglasses back on, picked up his surfboard and cycled off.

We did lots of things that weekend. We went over the chain ferry to the Isle of Purbeck and had lunch. We biked in the New Forest.

But surfer boy on the beach is the one thing my friend remembers.

It’s impossible for us to remember every single experience in our memory — we just don’t have the RAM.

How and why did my friend recall that experience?

The brain filter

How do you remember certain things? What gets stored, and what gets trashed? Our brains have interesting ways of storing stuff.

It’s efficient if not quirky.

What we experience and what we remember of that experience are two distinct things. The great Daniel Kahneman explains this elegantly in his TED talk.

“The remembering self is a storyteller… our memory tells us stories… that is what we get to keep from our experiences”.

Just like the image of the surfer riding along the prom with surfboard in-hand. It wasn’t the only experience of that weekend. But it’s the one that was saved as a memory.

Why is this important?

We all talk about ‘designing experiences’. The ‘experience economy’. ‘Customer Experience’. ‘User Experience’.

I read that the amount of folk gifting ‘Experiences’ rather than presents for Christmas rose again this year. Gift Experience company Red Letter Days, reported that demand for experience gifts had almost doubled in the past five years.

The Instagram generation happily share their experiences by a video of an event captured in the ‘you-had-to-be-there’ moment.

We value experiences, but which parts actually get remembered?

The answer to that question is not simple.

Most people remember very little of an experience. Maybe the beginning, parts of the middle and obviously the end.

My Insightful UX colleague, Lee, tells a great story of a user test he was involved in.

It was for a big insurance brand, and he was testing the competition to gather insights.

One of the competitors was a well-known brand. They were not known as insurance specialists, but they were a well-loved brand that just happened to offer insurance.

Whilst testing the website, one participant clearly struggled with the functionality, but, when asked to score their overall experience, said how great it was.

The participant loved the brand.

Their affinity towards it masked the usability issues. They forgot or forgave the bits where they couldn’t click a button or find what they were looking for.

There’s a whole bunch of factors that can affect an experience.

But in this case, in the end, it was brand.