The UX Secret Hidden Inside Human Memory

We design for what people do. We rarely design for how people remember. Those are not the same thing, and the difference explains a lot about why some products feel better than they actually were. A few years ago I had a conversation with a user that genuinely unsettled me. We had just finished a usability study on a financial planning tool. During the sessions themselves, I had watched this particular participant struggle with a specific multi step form, hesitating, backtracking, clicking through the wrong