Examining the Peak-End Effects of Subjective Experience

Abstract

Psychological research has shown that 'peak-end' effects influence people's retrospective evaluation of hedonic and affective experience. Rather than objectively reviewing the total amount of pleasure or pain during an experience, people's evaluation is shaped by the most intense moment (the peak) and the final moment (end). We describe an experiment demonstrating that peak-end effects can influence a user's preference for interaction sequences that are objectively identical in their overall requirements. Participants were asked to choose which of two interactive sequences of five pages they preferred. Both sequences required setting a total of 25 sliders to target values, and differed only in the distribution of the sliders across the five pages -with one sequence intended to induce positive peak-end effects, the other negative. The study found that manipulating only the peak or the end of the series did not significantly change preference, but that a combined manipulation of both peak and end did lead to significant differences in preference, even though all series had the same overall effort.

The effects of interaction sequencing on user experience and preference

“…Table 3 summarises prior studies in HCI relating to sequencing effects, identifying the primary momentary stimulus examined. The table shows that recency effects have generally been confirmed across a variety of stimuli, including mental effort (Hassenzahl and Sandweg, 2004), visible progress (Harrison et al, 2007), physical effort (Cockburn et al, 2015), game difficulty/challenge (Gutwin et al, 2016), and the satisfaction/frustration of user interface assistance and assistance failures (this paper). Fully separating the experiential influence of the stimuli in these experiments is difficult -for example, a manipulation of mental effort may also induce frustration and annoyance -however, the indications across studies are that recency effects occur across a wide range of different types of interactions.…”

“…In addition, attempts to directly test the existence of peak-end effects in interactive settings have produced equivocal results, with hypothesised preferences observed in only one of three conditions involving form-filling interfaces (Cockburn et al, 2015) and only one of eight tested conditions with computer games (Gutwin et al, 2016).…”

“…accelerating animations were generally perceived as faster than others) -although the animation that was perceived as fastest used a decelerating backwards pulse. Cockburn et al (2015) directly examined user preferences derived from peak-end effects. Their conditions varied the distribution of otherwise identical components of mundane physical workload in interactive tasks, with participants making a preference choice between two interactive series.…”

“…One factor contributing to the difference in effect between these two domains could be the very different stimuli evaluated in each domain. All of the stimuli examined in studies of interactive sequences are arguably less visceral than the stimuli typically examined in psychology experiments: for example, HCI studies have looked at mental workload (Hassenzahl and Sandweg, 2004), perception of progress bars (Harrison et al, 2007;2010), physical workload (Cockburn et al, 2015), and game difficulty (Gutwin et al, 2016); in contrast, psychological studies have used physical stimuli such as the pain of cold water immersion or surgical procedures, or the pleasure of receiving gifts.…”

23 Ways to Nudge

“…peak) and the last episode (i.e. end) [18]. This can have important implications as one could affect how we remember events, for instance, through changing their endings.…”