Product designers are well aware of the importance of providing customers with a good user-experience. And businesses are aware of the need to keep users happy. Although there is a good deal of literature on the subject of good design, the scholarly study of happiness is relatively young. The results we find from getting a greater understanding of happiness might help businesses improve their products and services.

Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman has a talk on TED about the role of memory in people’s perception of happiness. A key point in the talk is that human memory can be considered to have two separate parts: the ‘Experiencing Self’ and the ‘Remembering Self’. When people look back at a certain event in their life, their feelings about the memory of the event might be quite different from what they had actually felt while experiencing that event. Prof. Kaheman has a good example about how doctors use this insight while performing painful procedures on patients. In one study they found that if doctors prolonged a painful procedure such that the last few minutes were much less painful than the initial part, patients tended to remember only the last portion. Whenever they recalled the procedure they felt that it was not a bad experience. This was in contrast with other patients that went through short, painful procedures. This difference might be explained by the notion that our brains tend to store experiences as stories. And just as a good story is marked by important changes in story line, major events in the story and the ending, so does our memory’s perception of an experience depend on these factors.

At the end of the talk, there was a brief discussion about how the new results about our perceptions of Happiness and Satisfaction will affect public policy. That got me thinking about how a Tech company might use this knowledge. Here are a few things to consider:

1. Product Design: Armed with the knowledge that bad-endings are terrible for user experience, product designers must rethink the whole notion of ‘graceful-degradation’. It is possible to go beyond saving critical data and turn unexpected failures in to a not-so-bad user experiences. There are many examples of products that implement such features. For example, when Twitter goes down, users are shown the now rather famous ‘fail-whale’. Another example is Digg, where users are taken to the ‘Broken Axle’ page. The impact of these simple features is that they divert users’ attention from the bad part (the product just crashed) to a novelty. First time users wonder ‘Hey what is this Whale?’ The users’ conversations then revolve around the coolness of the ‘fail-whale’ or ‘broken-axle’. Firefox has a non-conventional message, saying something like, “Hey we are embarrassed we crashed. Click the button below to send us information that will help us fix this problem”. Over at TechCrunch,  Dmitri Dragilev as a similar themed article about using the notion of story telling to influence user memory. His inspiration though is quite different from Prof. Kahneman although he uses the same notion of narrating a good story to the user.
2. Tech Support: Make sure that customers hang-up the phone with a pleasant memory. If the user calls in and complains about a bad experience with your product, first resolve his problem. But do not stop with that. Try offering him something that will make him happy and forget the bad experience. For example, let’s say that your product is a design tool for engineers and the user had a problem with a particular feature of your tool. After resolving the user’s issue with your tool, ask him how you can help with his design problem. If you can offer advice on how to design a circuit or a piece of code, that might offset the user’s bad memory with your tool. The user will leave with the good memory that you helped him solve his design problem. Another option might be to transfer the customer to Sales and offer him discounts or freebies for his trouble.

You might be surprised how little it takes to convert a disatisfied customer in to a happy customer. It might be beneficial to make ‘user memory’ an important criterion of good product design.