You no doubt have read Tuft’s position on the cognitive style of PowerPoint. Now a heavy-weight cognitive scientist offers us four rules for doing better. “Harvard cognitive scientist Stephen M. Kosslyn, who studies how brains process images, wants to improve the world with his cutting-edge research. And he’s starting with four ways to make your PowerPoint presentations more human brain-compliant”
Cognitive designers envision products and services that enhance the thinking, emotions and other mental states of customers. They do the same for employees. That is, cognitive designers envision HR/employee programs, management policies, processes, workspaces, teams and other “organizational artifacts” that win the hearts, minds and mental states of employees.
So you can do cognitive design outside the firewall or inside the firewall. A good example of cognitive design inside the firewall (focus on employee cognition for the purposes of organizational improvement) can be found in a recent article on Leading Clever People. The authors Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, two business school professors, point out that clever (smart and creative) people are essential for success in today’s economy but they don’t respond well to the traditional leadership model. So they conducted interviews to find out why.
“What they learned is that the psychological relationships effective leaders have with their clever people are very different from the ones they have with traditional followers.”
Furthermore, they found that clever people have specific cognitive needs (or characteristics) that include:
Bore easily, value intellectual over positional status, understand their worth is based on tacit skills, expect instant access to top management as confirmation of the value of their work, ignore hierarchy, will gravitate to where their work is most appreciated and generously funded.
To support this type of employee cognition they offer the following design:
“The trick is to act like a benevolent guardian: to grant them the respect and recognition they demand, protect them from organizational rules and politics, and give them room to pursue private efforts and even to fail. The payoff will be a flourishing crop of creative minds that will enrich your whole organization.”
Some would argue that this is catering to an elite but it applies equally well to all type of employees it is just that “the trick” will be different. In Northwestern’s Master’s Program in Learning and Organization Change, we hit this point hard arguing that one of the main things that makes cognitive design important today is that talented employees demand a workplace that reflects it. It is up to managers and leaders to understand the cognitive needs of employees and design HR/employee programs and management practices to meet them. Professors Goffee and Jones gave us a great example of how to do that. One that illustrates that understanding the cognitive needs of employees is not rocket science. They did not have to do a brain scanning study or do cognitive task analysis. All they did was look and ask.
We live in an economy where most of the value is created by services not goods. That’s why there is a big push on to develop a new discipline of service science, management and engineering. The other reason is that we don’t know much about services. Unlike products, they are intangible, experience-based and operate on different rules. The areas of service design and service innovation are buzzing. Cognitive design will play a key role in services innovation and we will chronicle that closely in this blog. As way of an example, check out Jeanne Rae’s recent article Seek the Magic of Service Prototypes. Some key points:
“Studies show that people gravitate toward products and services that make them feel good, safe, calm, or happy”
“Rather than defining a service by what it does, think of it as the reaction it elicits from the people using it.”
“Good service prototypes appeal to the emotions and avoid drawing attention to features, costs, and applications that can clutter the conversation and derail the excitement factor. Storytelling, vignettes, cartoons, amateur videos—all are low-budget tools that bypass the intellectual “gristmill” and go straight to the heart.”
This approach clearly puts designing for mental states on equal or even more important footing than designing for the core functionality/features of the offering. That is what cognitive design is all about!
Just finished work with a client who is a big believer in cognitive design. They have done a great job using the latest ideas in cognitive science to design a truly positive service experience for their customers. But he wants to do more, much more. The question he asked was how can I go from a positive experience to something truly great using cognitive design?
We looked at a lot of things but decided to make use of recent insights into to the cognition of savoring. Ask yourself, when was the last time your really savored a positive experience – luxuriating in a pleasure, basking in a moment of pride, truly giving thanks or marveling at something that is just awesome? Savoring is an important cognitive process (essentially for happiness and optimal functioning) that, according to Fred B. Bryant, a professor of psychology at the Loyola University, involves “attending to, appreciating and enhancing the positive experiences in life”. For more check out his latest book, Savoring a New Model of Positive Experience. It is a treasure trove for the cognitive designer!
The central design question became what features and functionality could we add to the service to help customers perceive, appreciate and amplify the positive experience they were already having? Of course, we had to first decide which specific mental state (or underlying emotion) – pleasure, pride, gratitude or awe fit the service.
The “perceive and appreciate” part came down to helping customers block out the rest of the world and really relax. Often we fail to savior life’s experiences because we are too hurried, worried about the future or just plain tired. As a designer, ask yourself what features and functions can you add that will get rid of the noise and momentarily suspend the pressures of everyday life. Sometimes just promising the right thing can invoke user memories supporting that. Remember the “Calgon take me away commercials”?
Once focused users will need to help amplifying the positive experience to take pleasure to luxuriating, pride to basking and so on. Tactics for doing this include anticipating the positive experience, prolonging the positive experience or having ways to relive it once you are done. Anticipation, time extensions and reliving all amplify and if done right allow us to savor a positive experience. We often do this naturally by telling friends and family about our plans (anticipation) and the details of a positive experience (reliving). Providing features and functions that support the telling of a positive experience can lead to savoring. Allowing user to hit “instant replay” or “more like this” or otherwise elongate the experience (e.g. intentionally delays in staging a multi-course meal) can also induce savoring.
Savoring is not just for luxury brands and high-end services. Think about lottery tickets. Wins (even small ones) are retold many times and recounted with pride that can safely be described as basking. The anticipation of a future positive experience they create is very intense and the “hope of wining big” is a luxuriating experience for many.
No matter, savoring is a distinct mental state that we can target as designers. Interestingly, according to Professor Bryant, it only comes in four flavors – luxuriating, basking, thanksgiving and marveling.
Designs that return us to the past are having a growing impact. Retro design intentionally resurrects or recycles an artifact from the past feeding nostalgia and triggering reminiscing in consumers. We see retro designs in cars, buildings, furniture, websites, movies, fashion, restaurants, advertising and almost everything in our culture. Retro design shows no signs of being a fad but is morphing and expanding, reflecting a fundamental and perhaps unquenchable consumer need.
This consumer need is infact a cognitive need generated from the longing for the past often in a romanticized or idealized form (nostalgia). As an emotional state, nostalgia serves several important psychological functions including: reinforcing our sense of self, regenerating meaning and strengthening social connections (see this excerpt from the handbook of experimental existential psychology).
Remembering the past – even if we reconstruct it a bit to meet psychological needs – can be a bittersweet experience. Invoking it can create a state of cognitive dissonance (holding two or more conflicting beliefs or emotions at once). For example, a product might be designed to remind you of the happy times you had with your grandparents but at the same time remind you that they are no longer alive.
Retro design plays off of (paternalistically we hope) a strong cognitive bias held by most people – “remember the good old past”. Longing for the past, seems to be so strong that we will buy into any past even if it is not part of our experience. Specifically, younger people will buy retro products rooted in artifacts from earlier generation’s experience. This means I will be pulled in by the retro effect even if what is being recycled was not part of my personal childhood or earlier life experience. Paul Grainge calls this the “aestheticization of nostalgia”. Something satisfies my longing for the past if I can recognize that it comes from a stylized past - it does not need to be part of my personal past.
Reminiscing goes a step further in that it allows me to relive or remember personally experienced episode from my past. So the retro design of the new Ford Mustang might remind me of my first car and the time I…. This invokes another powerful cognitive effect – Savoring. In this case I am savoring the past which can put me in a state of pleasure, pride, gratitude or even awe.
So what are the implications for the cognitive designer? When using retro effects we should:
Be clear what unmet cognitive need we are trying to satisfy (opportunity to tell my story, relive sense of pride from earlier time, discharge longing for the past, etc.)
Decide between reminding users of “the past”, something in the past, or something in their past
Support the reconstructive aspects of memory (romanticizing the past) in ways that lead to optimal cognitive functioning
Manage potential cognitive dissonance (bittersweet memories) to ultimately help the user savior the past
Retro design hold the potential for creating rich cognitive states that transform otherwise ordinary artifacts into vivid personal experiences.
A recent essay in Wired, When reality feels like playing a game a new era has begun, points out that the “gaming mindset has now become pervasive. We use game models to motivate ourselves, to answer question, to find creative solutions.” And why not? Games move our hearts and minds, they are powerful cognitive stuff. Mimicking excellent cognitive designs is a great way to innovate.
And it works for anything not just games. The key is to deconstruct or reverse engineer the design to understand what makes it tick from a cognitive science standpoint. Then you can replicate the effect by adding new features and functions to your product. Last year I ran a two-day cognitive design workshop focused on this technique. Attracted participants from several industries and we deconstructed high impact cognitive designs including lottery tickets, video games, life saving services, idea viruses, works of art and the like. Out of the box thinking was the goal.
For example, leveraging the design of lottery tickets that offer hope (but not a rational chance) of “making it big” an insurance agent developed a provocative idea for longevity insurance. Many are worried about outliving their financial assets. This creates what insurance professionals call a longevity risk (risk of living to long). For a very small monthly premium (say $10/ month) it might be possible to offer a very large payout benefit (say a million dollars) if the policy was designed to payout at a very advanced age (say 90 years old). Chances are nearly everyone buying the product won’t get the benefit but very few will and they get the big pay day (just like a lottery ticket). Needless to say this idea generated a storm of debate in the workshop. And it should.
There was also an engineer that developed an idea for playing a game over a GPS system for commuters caught in traffic. The game was designed to naturally keep the drivers attention focused on the traffic (avoiding safety concerns and perhaps even helping to solve a current safety issue) and had a strong element of competition built in (so as to engage cognition). Again objections from other workshop participants but that stimulated refinements.
It is fun to think about lotterizing or gamifying your products and services and that may even generate some actionable ideas if you understand the cognitive science at work. But for most firms that would not play well with their brand image. Fortunately, high-impact cognitive designs abound and so there are plenty to mimic no matter what your brand or target market.
Modern science tells us cognition is pattern-driven, metaphoric, unconscious, biased, mostly emotional and embodied. A far cry from the symbol manipulating computer seeking to maximize utility and juggling weighted alternatives that the more classical theory of rationality gave us.
This blog will take the modern characterization of cognition and unpack it to expose the implications for designers. For example, what does the fact that cognition is “embodied” mean to me as a designer? How will it help me to design better products, services or organizations?
Just a few days ago the Boston Globe published a news story that brought some attention to the idea of embodied cognition. The core idea is that we develop, learn and think using our bodies (motion, gestures eye movements). It is not just the brain but also our bodies that are the engines of thinking. In this way, cognition is “of the body” or embodied.
From a design standpoint, this puts a premium on sensorial, interaction and experiential design approaches but with an important spin – how can we use these techniques to engage the sensorimotor capabilities of the user to support and enhance cognition?
Consider for example how well Apple’s ClickWheel (or scroll wheel) on the iPod connects thumb/finder motion to the cognition of searching large lists and making a selection.
Engage the senses, engage the body and then engage the brain as a natural progression. This is what we are hardwired to do.
This means every cognitive designer (no matter what project they are working on) must answer the question:
How do the users think with their bodies?
Not your typical design stance.
The fact that we think with our senses and bodies and insist on doing so even when we a put in abstract situations (nearly all the metaphors we use are grounded in direct experience), creates some real challenges for design intangible products. Said another way, lack of embodiment is a major reason why the design of intangible artifacts fail. For example, think about the design of financial products or organizational change programs. They deal more with abstract concepts, delayed benefits and darn if I can hold one in my hand or even see it. Not very supportive of embodied cognition.
But you can change that through good design. My favorite example comes from the folks at the Institute of the Future and their work on prescient products . These are products that don’t really exist (that is intangible) but might in the future per the forecasts developed by the institute. So the product here is potential product concept based on a research-based forecast. Rather than just selling the intangible product as a written report, they mock them up and enhance the embodied cognition of their clients. Prescient products can now be touched, manipulated, smelled and so on. Check out the example of pharmaceutically enhanced fruit
Or another (source Wired Magazine) of the concept of soft drinks that burn calories when we consume them:
Imagine passing cans of this around to stimulate thinking and discussions on trends in nutrition, weight management and soft drinks. This reflects maximum respect for embodied cognition.
The design priority is to make the abstract concrete in a way that naturally engages the embodied brain.
Video games and virtual worlds are great at doing this — they give us bodies (or let us create our own) in simulated worlds and where we interact flexibly in real-time in rich and engaging contexts. A hyper-stimulant for the embodied brain. Adapting this effect to design non-entertainment applications (training, self development, etc.) is what the “serious game” movement is about. We will explore serious games and other techniques that promise to inspire superior designs for embodied cognition in future posts.
Check out the on-line encylopedia on interaction-design.org. Clear writing on some of the cognitive aspects of design.
Of particular interest is the article on Cognitive Ergonomics.
Cognitive ergonomics (sometimes called cognitive engineering) is focused on understanding and supporting the cognition of work especially when it is complex, time-constrained or related to public safety. The focus is on process or work redesign (e.g. to lower cognitive load), human-machine interfaces, training programs and technologies to augment cognition.
Cognitive ergonomics is about remaking work to better fit the human mind. One of the core pursuit of cognitive design.
In the US, cognitive ergonomics is now flying the flag of cognitive engineering and decision making (CEDM) a large technical interest group within the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
We will track CEDM in this blog and report on specific findings and tools useful for cognitive designers.
The May/June 07 edition of Technology Review was focused on design. The lead article introduces the idea of a beautiful machine as something that is minimally complicated. You may need to set up a free account to get access.
Watch the video and listen to the editor’s description of his new Apple computer. Wow has Apple mastered the ability to create specific mental states in users (one of the goals of cognitive design). Just in case you don’t get to the video here is some of the narrative:
“I love my MacBook Pro because its broad but slim body seems luxuriously solid yet also gracefully light. I love how the resistance subtly increases when I press a key, flattering my touch. I love the crisp definition of the graphics on its large, luminous screen. Most of all, I love how all my Macintosh software shares an elegant iconography and navigation scheme, and how all my Apple hardware works together uncomplainingly.”
The concept of minimally complicated is an intertesting design principle. Another quote from the editor:
“That is, they should have no more functions than is reasonable given their form; every function should be no more complicated than it needs to be; and the way each function works should be intuitively easy to understand. As Albert Einstein may have said, “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.” ”
This advice is especially relevant as we try and repackage existing functionality into new forms as is the case with many mobile devices. For example, email as something engineered for a desktop PC, needs to be de-functioned a bit to fit the form of a handheld. So I still have the complicated functionality of email but it has been minimized to fit the new form. Presto minimal complication.
Of course there is the aesthetics of this too…..
