HEDONIC ADAPTATION: THE SAME DESIGN SCORES LOWER EVERY YEAR

Summary from the TLDR Design newsletter

Users grow accustomed to good design just as they do to sudden wealth, so satisfaction scores on an unchanged product tend to slip roughly 2–5% each year as expectations rise. Chasing novelty through redesigns, gamification, or variable-reward feeds backfires, since delight fades quickly while recurring irritations remain persistently noticeable. The recommended strategy is to fix intermittent annoyances, benchmark against competitors rather than past scores, and treat gradual reliability gains as the lasting payoff, not fleeting delight.