When I received an email a few weeks ago from Chip and Dan Heath, I was pretty excited by the news they shared.

It announced that after several years since their last book, Decisive, a new one was on the way. For a fan of their books, that’s already great news. But it gets even better. The subject matter of this new work has me eagerly awaiting the book.

What topic did the Heath brothers decide to write about this time? Experiences!

That alone would be incredible for someone, like me, who is student of user experience. As an added bonus, Chip and Dan Heath are exploring the “moment” and the power of a defining moment. This resonates strongly with me because my leadership book is based on this idea of the importance of moments, which I refer to as crucible moments.

In the email they described this new book, titled The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact, this way:

Research in psychology teaches us that our memories of experiences are not like films that we can rewind and watch beginning to end. They are more like snapshots or snippets. Fragments. In memory, we cling to particular minutes or hours that rise above the surrounding weeks and months. What makes those moments so memorable and meaningful? That’s a critical question for anyone who wants to improve the experiences of others: the customer experience, the employee experience, the patient experience—not to mention the experience of your kids. Because what you’ll soon discover is that when we talk about “experience,” we’re really talking about moments. Moments that serve as peaks in time.

I’ve written about the link between experiences and memory previously at DBL. We not only remember things differently from what actually happened, but we selectively remember parts of our experiences more powerfully than others.

The tendency is for people to remember how the experience begins and how it ends more strongly than other parts, which is why we want to design the experience so it gets off to a good start and ends on a high note – particularly the finish because that’s an opportunity to recover from anything less memorable or negative that happens after the start.

The book’s intent is to both help us to understand the important of these defining moments to the success of an experience – and to develop insight into how to design them into experiences so they are more likely to occur. They define “defining moment” as “a short experience that is both memorable and meaningful”.

Those are two word that figure prominently in numerous DBL posts. Is it possible for librarians to create user experiences that are memorable, meaningful and that build emotional connections with community members that lead to loyalty? With help from the Heath brothers, we may learn more about how to do this.

I finished reading chapter one (a preview sent only to those on the Heath mail list) and I’m eager to learn more about the four elements that go into creating a defining moment: elevation; insight; pride; connection. As with other Heath brother books, based on this first chapter, it should be immensely readable, chock full of stories and examples (these are the guys who wrote Made to Stick) and offer takeaway ideas that you can put into practice.

After I read the book, I hope to have more ideas to share on how we can create defining moments for library user experiences – but I hope other librarians will read it as well – so that we can come up with even more ideas for designing better libraries.