Agent skill · owl-listener
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`.
What it needs
About 3k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
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: 1. The peak — the most emotionally intense moment, positive or negative 2. 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. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills owl-listener/peak-end-rule