peak-end-rule
Apply the Peak-End Rule — a flow is remembered by its most intense moment and its last. Use when designing completion, celebration, or cancellation moments. For sustaining engagement mid-flow, use zeigarnik-effect.
- Installs
- 1.1K
- Last 24h
- +22
- Trending rank
- #5550
- Security
- Not audited
Install
Works with every agent the skills CLI supports.
npx skills add https://github.com/owl-listener/designer-skills --skill peak-end-rule- 01
Install
Run the command in your project. The CLI asks which agents to install for.
- 02
Describe the task
Ask your agent for something this skill covers. It loads peak-end-rule automatically when relevant.
- 03
Review the result
The agent follows the SKILL.md steps, scripts and references bundled with the skill.
SKILL.md
The instructions your agent reads when the skill is triggered.
Peak-End Rule
You are an expert in experience design and the psychology of retrospective evaluation.
What You Do
You apply the Peak-End Rule to identify the moments in a user journey that dominate how the experience is remembered and rated — and design those moments deliberately.
The Principle
Daniel Kahneman's research found that people do not evaluate experiences as a running average of moment-to-moment quality. Retrospective judgement is dominated by two moments:
- The peak — the most emotionally intense moment, positive or negative
- The end — how the experience concluded
The duration and average quality of everything in between contribute far less. This is "duration neglect": people are poor judges of how long something took, but accurate judges of how it felt at its extremes.
Design Implications
Design the peak deliberately
If the experience has a natural moment of resolution, success, or payoff, make it genuinely satisfying:
- The moment of completing a purchase, booking, or signup
- First delivery of a meaningful result (a generated document, a completed plan, a rendered design)
- A meaningful milestone in a longer arc (finishing a module, reaching a threshold, hitting a streak)
If the experience contains an unavoidable negative peak — a long wait, a failed action, a rejection — design around it: set expectations before it arrives, provide something useful during it, and make the recovery the new peak.
Design the end deliberately
The final moment of a session shapes overall impression more than most of what preceded it:
- End a checkout on a warm, clear confirmation — not a confusing order status page
- End an onboarding session at a moment of first visible value, not a setup screen
- End a data-entry session with unambiguous save confirmation
- Avoid ending on an error state; resolve or defer errors before session close wherever possible
Practical Applications
| Flow | Peak to design | End to design |
|---|---|---|
| Checkout | Order placed — confirmed, named, visualised | Warm confirmation with clear next steps |
| Onboarding | First output the user cares about | State showing their work is saved and accessible |
| Signup | "You're in" — the first landing inside the product | Dashboard or landing that demonstrates immediate value |
| Data-heavy tasks | Completing the most complex required step | Summary or confirmation of what was saved |
| Error recovery | The fix moment, not the error state | Clear signal that the issue is fully resolved |
Duration Neglect in Practice
Users will rate a 10-minute experience that ended well above a 5-minute experience that ended poorly. Practical implications:
- Wait times: a long wait that ends in clear success is rated better than a short wait that ends in confusion
- Multi-session journeys: the final session before a user disengages drives retrospective rating more than aggregate usage quality
- Negative spikes: a single bad moment is over-weighted unless the recovery is excellent — design the recovery to become the new peak
Best Practices
- Map the emotional arc of every key flow; explicitly mark the highest-intensity moment and the final moment
- Invest disproportionately in the peak and the end — the return on design effort is higher there than in the middle
- Test recall: after a flow, ask users to describe the experience in their own words — what they describe is almost always the peak and the end
- Design recovery first: if the peak is necessarily negative, the recovery must be strong enough to become the remembered event
- Never end on an administrative or transitional screen — ending on accomplishment is always preferable to ending on process
FAQ
What does the peak-end-rule skill do?
Apply the Peak-End Rule — a flow is remembered by its most intense moment and its last. Use when designing completion, celebration, or cancellation moments. For sustaining engagement mid-flow, use zeigarnik-effect.
How do I install peak-end-rule?
Run npx skills add https://github.com/owl-listener/designer-skills --skill peak-end-rule in your project. The skills CLI detects the agents you use and copies the skill into the right folder. For Claude Code you can also place the skill folder at ~/.claude/skills/peak-end-rule/ (personal) or .claude/skills/peak-end-rule/ (project).
Which AI agents can use peak-end-rule?
Any agent that supports the open Agent Skills format (a folder with a SKILL.md file), including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, Cline, OpenCode and more.
Is peak-end-rule safe to install?
No partner security audit is available yet. Skills can run commands and scripts, so read the SKILL.md and any bundled files before installing.
Who maintains peak-end-rule?
It is published by owl-listener in owl-listener/designer-skills. It has 1,071 recorded installs.
More from owl-listener/designer-skills
presentation-deck
owl-listener/designer-skills
Structure a design presentation for a specific audience and decision. Use when presenting internally. For a portfolio narrative use case-study; for the written argument use design-rationale.
typography-scale
owl-listener/designer-skills
Create a modular type scale with size, weight, and line-height relationships. Use when establishing typographic structure. For line length only use readable-measure; for judging type on an existing screen use critique-typography (visual-critique).
illustration-style
owl-listener/designer-skills
Define an illustration style guide — visual language, colour usage, and application rules. Use when commissioning or standardising illustration. For icons, use icon-system (design-systems).
visual-hierarchy
owl-listener/designer-skills
Establish hierarchy through size, weight, colour, spacing, and position so the eye lands in the intended order. Use when composing new work. For judging an existing screen, use critique-visual-hierarchy (visual-critique).
color-system
owl-listener/designer-skills
Build a product colour system — tonal scales, semantic roles, and contrast compliance. Use when defining or rebuilding colour from scratch. For dark-mode adaptation use dark-mode-design; for chart palettes use data-visualization; for multi-brand token architecture use theming-system (design-systems).
dark-mode-design
owl-listener/designer-skills
Adapt an existing palette to dark mode — surface elevation, contrast rebalancing, and desaturation rules. Use when you already have a light palette to translate. For building the base palette first, use color-system.
Popular frontend & design skills
setup-matt-pocock-skills
mattpocock/skills
Configure this repo for the engineering skills: set up its issue tracker, triage label vocabulary, and domain doc layout. Run once before first use of the other engineering skills.
frontend-design
anthropics/skills
Guidance for distinctive, intentional visual design when building new UI or reshaping an existing one. Helps with aesthetic direction, typography, and making choices that don't read as templated defaults.
hyperframes-animation
heygen-com/hyperframes
All animation knowledge for HyperFrames — atomic motion rules, multi-phase scene blueprints, scene transitions, broader motion-design techniques, AND the seven runtime adapters (GSAP default, plus Lottie, Three.js, Anime.js, CSS keyframes, Web Animations API, TypeGPU). Use for any motion or animation task: pick 2-4 rules and compose, or load a blueprint, or look up runtime-specific API (e.g. GSAP eases / Lottie player / Three.js mixer). Also covers auditing an existing composition's choreography (animation map) and 24 named text-animation effects. HyperFrames-native: single paused timeline, seek-safe, deterministic.
prototype
mattpocock/skills
Build a throwaway prototype to answer a design question. Use when the user wants to sanity-check whether a state model or logic feels right, or explore what a UI should look like.
hyperframes-core
heygen-com/hyperframes
The HyperFrames composition contract — build one renderable project. Use for composition structure, the data- timing attributes, class="clip", tracks, sub-compositions, variables, framework-owned media playback, deterministic-render rules, and validation. Read before writing composition HTML.
vercel-react-best-practices
vercel-labs/agent-skills
React and Next.js performance optimization guidelines from Vercel Engineering. This skill should be used when writing, reviewing, or refactoring React/Next.js code to ensure optimal performance patterns. Triggers on tasks involving React components, Next.js pages, data fetching, bundle optimization, or performance improvements.