Happy Thursday.
It turns out nobody remembers the middle of anything. Not a Netflix series. Not a dinner party. Not their last relationship.
We hope you’ll remember this newsletter issue entirely.
Reading time: 5 minutes, 11 seconds
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- Bridge Builder? Use our talking points to align execs and engineers.
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- Practical Learner? Build confidence with bite-size lessons you can apply today.
Mindstream protects your time—it’s a five minute daily read. They make AI make sense so you can lead with context, communicate with confidence, and deliver results you and your team feels.
Duration Neglect
Everyone remembers that one twist ending of a long movie.
But do you remember most of the middle? Not really. Rarely anyone does.
That’s Duration Neglect that’s doing its thing. Our brains don’t judge experiences by averaging every moment. They snapshot two points: the emotional peak and the very end.
Everything in between? Compressed into background noise your memory barely registers.
Daniel Kahneman and Donald Redelmeier demonstrated this in a landmark colonoscopy study.
Patients who endured longer procedures — but with gradually easing discomfort at the end — rated the overall experience as less painful.
Those with shorter procedures that ended abruptly? Remembered it as worse. More total suffering, better memories.
You can encounter this everywhere:
- A grueling 10-hour flight feels fine if the landing is smooth and the crew smiles at the gate.
- A spectacular restaurant dinner gets destroyed by a 20-minute wait for the check.
We judge every experience—shopping, onboarding, browsing, by its peak moment and its ending. Everything in between? Noise.
That’s a massive unlock for anyone building customer experiences. Stop obsessing over every touchpoint equally. Focus your budget on the moments that actually get encoded.
Three ways to leverage the Duration Neglect
1) Turn standard delivery into a memorable peak
The time between clicking buy and receiving the product is a vulnerable waiting period in e-commerce. The delivery is the final moment of the purchasing experience.
Chewy, the pet supply retailer, expertly turns this mundane ending into a massive emotional peak:
They often include surprise handwritten welcome notes for new customers.
Sometimes, they even commission and send custom painted portraits of their customers’ pets.
If a customer waited seven days for shipping, that duration is instantly forgotten.
The overwhelming delight of the personalized ending becomes the only thing they remember about the transaction.
We can use this by upgrading our unboxing experience or sending a highly personalized post-purchase email.
End the transaction on a remarkably high note, and the customer will definitely return.
2) Design a memorable final screen
Most SaaS tools dump you on a blank dashboard after sign-up. Loom does the opposite.
Their desktop recorder includes a built-in confetti shortcut that lets senders celebrate milestones on camera. Product launches, team wins, onboarding completions — all end with a visual bang.
This tiny animation turns a forgettable async message into something people actually remember and talk about.
The last thing a user sees after completing a flow shapes their entire memory of your product.
A celebratory end screen costs nothing but rewrites the experience.
3) Engineer a mid-journey emotional spike
Sometimes the process is simply too long that most won’t bother until the end.
In these cases, we must manufacture an artificial emotional peak right in the middle.
Noom does this exceptionally well during their notoriously long onboarding questionnaire.
Answering dozens of personal health questions is universally recognized as a tedious experience. But Noom breaks the monotony by inserting personalized, encouraging data halfway through the process.
You answer a batch of questions, and the interface suddenly generates a custom success graph. They use conversational transitions like, “Based on this, you can hit your goal by July!”
This creates a sudden spike of hope and momentum in an otherwise flat, clinical experience.
When the user finishes, they remember the encouraging projection rather than the total time spent clicking.
We can apply this by adding unexpected personalized insights into our longest funnels.
Stop drowning in AI information overload
Your inbox is flooded with newsletters. Your feed is chaos. Somewhere in that noise are the insights that could transform your work—but who has time to find them?
Replace hours of scattered reading with five focused minutes. While others scramble to keep up, you’ll stay ahead of developments that matter. 500,000+ professionals at top companies have already made this switch.
WHATSAPP: …has become an ad platform, too. Status Ads that appear between user status updates, and Promoted Channels that show up front in the directory are now live globally. WhatsApp has over 2B users you can advertise to and it’s still relatively uncontested. Just saying.
INFLUENCER MARKETING: Does the best marketing come outside of your marketing team? Because user-generated content (UGC) now drives 35% of global influencer campaigns. The multi-channel content type is outpacing TikTok-only by 21% share and trailing only Instagram at 40%.
ADVERTISING: According to research from Science Says, humans link brands to the content surrounding them. When ads for brands like AT&T or Nissan appeared next to controversial content, users reported a 19% drop in brand opinion and a 18% drop in trust. Uh-oh.
TIKTOK: Adobe’s research shows TikTok’s role as a search engine has nearly doubled in two years, now used by close to half of all US consumers. People use TikTok to find things, weigh options, and make real purchasing decisions. Time to include this in your awareness strategy.
META: The AI chatbot now recommends products directly in chat, showing US users branded carousels with pricing and retailer options. There’s no checkout yet, but the feature already tailors recommendations to a user’s inferred location and gender.
ICYMI, last time we looked at the Information Bias.
The “forgot-the-middle” Crew.
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