People remember how you make them feel

I can’t quite remember where I heard it from, maybe it was my brother, but I remember hearing the saying that people don’t remember what you did, but they remember how you made them feel. Searching it up now, it was a famous quote by Maya Angelou, a poet, performer, and civil rights activist.

Now I don’t know the context that she said it in, but I am sure it’s probably more profound than the context that me and my brother were using it. When we were going through our colognes and fragrance phase, I remember advocating for one cologne that I like by arguing that people remember how you make them feel, but not the specifics of what you did. I tried to make the argument that people don’t care about the specific notes of the fragrance, only that it brings out a feeling and vibe that others pick up.

I wanted to use his own argument against him in that sense. But anyways, this idea started infecting many different things in my life. Whether it was how I interacted with other people as a leader in my organizations and band, or how I wanted to design my website and this blog.

UI/UX In Everything

Learning the basics of design by building this website took this idea to another level when interactions with my brother, band directors, and mentors started to become more important. I kept going back to the idea that people remember how you make them feel.

Emails and Messages

Make things concise, simple, digestible, and easily accessible.

Space out your information to be more organized.

Make things less complex with more simple sentences.

I started learning the importance of putting effort in the way you communicate. Go the extra mile to bold, italicize, and resize certain information. Contrast certain elements of text to draw attention to the things that you want people to see.

I started assuming that people only skim what I send them, so I started designing my messages to satisfy those users. I started creating a UX that conforms to the natural inclination for humans to take the path of least resistance every time. In inspirit of this, I started to use hyperlinks far more often—people love interacting and clicking with things. For example: “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxS5E-kZc2s”

Bringing the thrill of interaction into my messages make people far more likely to engage in what I say, and make it far easier for them to access the message I want to get across. In the things that I do, making others want to listen to you, read your messages, and communicate with you make things a lot easier in the long run as opposed to sending a disorganized, not easily digestible message, only to get dozens of questions after.

The point

If you ask for someone’s help, or communicate with them regularly, make it easy for them to get your message. When you ask someone to read a long blog, at least make it easy for them to learn from it. When someone asks you a question on when a good time to meet is, give them multiple specific dates, and do the thinking for them (because, like you, they don’t want to have to go through the effort of digging through their calendar to find random times and dates to meet.)

View the small little details as small messages to others’ subconscious that “I like working with this person,” so they remember how easy it was working with you, and yet they don’t remember or know exactly why.

I am still not the greatest at it, but this concept of UI/UX in everything I produce, (from websites, to emails, to GroupMe messages) has been a valuable philosophy and perspective I started to incorporate far more in my life now. I believe, it can be a valuable part in yours too.