Cognitive Design

Experience is a four layer cake.  For example, experience with products and services is shaped by the interaction we have with them and how:

1. useful they are (meet core needs)
2. easy they are to use (usability)
3. they delight the senses (sensory design)
4. well they authentically move hearts and extend minds (cognitive design)

We use cognitive design to shape the fourth layer of the experience by creating interactions with a specific think-and-feel.   Market leading firms in every industry seek to differentiate their offerings with a think-and-feel and therefore compete through fourth level innovation.

Take for example, drive-thru service in quick serve restaurants.  Billions of dollars of food is served from the drive-thru windows at McDonalds, Taco Bell, Wendy’s and other fast-food or quick serve restaurants every year. Indeed, more money is made from drive-thru than the dinning room in the quick serve business.

Customers want fast and accurate drive-thru service. Market leaders have invested plenty in menu modifications, technology, lean, six sigma and other process excellence methods to insure customers get fast and accurate drive-thru experiences.

They have done the engineering to meet core needs (layer one). Ease of use is paramount and is achieved through clearly marked ordering lanes, readable order board displays and features such as price and order confirmation (layer two).  The sensory design can make or break the experience.  Speaker volume, digital displays, smell and an environment that appears clean and safe are a few examples (layer three).

But all of that is all table stakes (excuse the pun), as QSR magazine points out in their special report on the Drive-Thru Experience:

 “Customers tell us that the status quo is not OK anymore. They want a drive-thru experience that is positive and personal,” Del Taco’s director of operations Kevin Pope says.

That means doing cognitive design (layer four).  Some examples:

1. Speaking casually during ordering to let customer drive the pace and tone
2. Allow customers to enter their own orders through a digital pad
3. Give out free dog biscuits to cars with dogs
4. Use outside order takers with hand-held computers when lines get long

While these efforts are preliminary, they do signal that fourth level innovation is at work at the drive-thru. The question is, what type to think-and-feel do customers want?  

There has been a strong positive response to functionality that increases the level of customer control. Order and price confirmation and casual rather than structured ordering dialog are two examples.  Surveys have found that customers even want to enter their own orders on digital pads. Customers may be expressing the cognitive need for more comfortable control in the drive-thru process.  The idea is to allow customers to determine the level of control they want in the process so that they are psychologically comfortable.   

Sometimes it is important to know what they don’t want. One survey found:

“When asked whether or not they wanted more entertainment from the quick serve while waiting in the drive-thru lane, all participants agreed that they were comfortable with sticking with their own devices. “

It would be interesting to know what people do as they sit in their cars in a drive up.  Do they worry or relax? Do they check emails and Facebook on their phone?  Is there some way to enhance or integrate what they are doing with the drive-thru experience?

Could this be an opportunity to positively encourage behavior change and select healthier items on the menu?

In many ways, the X Prize sits at the top of the heap when it comes to prize-based open innovation.  Anyone can enter, they offer large prizes (typically $10M) and are framed to create breakthroughs in important areas.  X Prizes have been won for creating super efficient cars and getting people into orbit and back safely. Right now there is a lot of buzz as 29 teams officially compete for Google’s $30M Lunar X prize. The goal is to send a robot to the moon that can travel at least 500 meters on the surface and send data, including images, back to Earth.

X prizes present serious scientific and engineering challenges.  Cognitive engineering and design typically do not play a key role. Until now. Qualcomm and the X prize foundation just announce the $10M Tricorder X Prize.   The goal and naming of the prize is inspired by the Tricorder, a hand-held device on the series Star Trek that quickly figures out what injury or medical problem you have.

To win the Tricorder X Prize, a team will need to demonstrate a mobile device that can ”diagnose patients better than or equal to a panel of board certified physicians”.  It will also advise consumers on the next steps including the need to seek professional help. Meeting this challenge requires not only significant hardware and software engineering but cognitive engineering and design as well.  

Success turns on understanding the knowledge and cognition of  medical diagnoses and using technology to automate and maintain it.  

This is a hard artificial intelligence and expert system problem.  Furthermore, doing medical diagnosis on a mobile device in a way that will be accepted by consumers acting on their own presents a serious cognitive design challenge.

The prize is in the design phase. This means it is not yet officially funded. It will be further defined this year and if Qualcomm decides to, it will be funded and launched in 2012.   I strongly encourage readers of this blog to contact Qualcomm and the X prize Foundation and encourage them to move forward.

Good cognitive designs pay particular attention (by dedicating features and functions) to psychological moments of truth (PMOT) in the customer experience. Casinos that use real time analytics to know when a high-value gambler is just getting ready to leave the table or a behavior change program that includes a “call your buddy” option when you are nearing relapse are two service designs focused on PMOT. These go far beyond the traditional PMOT of making a good first impression that many designs focus on. Product and service interactions are loaded with PMOT.

Anytime you have a strong emotional reaction (e.g. we often hear I love my phone, I hate my insurance company and performance evaluations are a pain) you are experiencing a PMOT success or failure.  Products or services that directly involve cognition – education, healthcare behavior change, decision support at work – are dominated by PMOT.  These psychological moments of truth are not nice-to-haves or frosting on the service cake, they involve fundamentally important outcomes.

Take for example the need for watchful waiting in healthcare. Patients and clinicians can deal with symptoms that may be best resolved by careful watching versus prescriptions, expensive tests or trips to the emergence room. Yet patients are fearful and clinicians may feel the need to practice defensive medicine.   When the emotional stress hits the decision making process we have a psychological moment of truth.  Combine that with the cost of care being diffused by a third party and a fee for service model that links not waiting with making money and the PMOT becomes even more intense.  We are not dealing with this very well. The result of not adequately supporting the cognition of watchful waiting is a major cost and quality driver in the US healthcare system.

McKinsey Quarterly recently published a summary of what neuroscience has to tell us about Sparking Creativity on Teams. While the findings won’t be news to readers of the Cognitive Design blog, having them summarized with references is useful. Key points include:

* Drop verbal persuasion and argument as a way to change thinking and use immersion by designing events where team members directly observe or experience new ideas. For example, send the team on best practice visits (including plenty of flexible interaction time) to successful organizations in other industries.

 * Use analogies and metaphors to force a comparison between seeming unrelated ideas or domains. For example, draw analogies between Amazon and your favorite lawn care service.

* Create artificial constraints to encourage reframing to generate insights. For example, what if we could only interact with our customers online?

Immersion, analogies and constraints when skillfully added into a problem solving process really do boost creativity because they take advantage of how our minds actually work.

Image Source: Success Rockets 

I have bee reviewing the findings from the 2011 Temkin Customer Experience Ratings. You can access the entire report for free. Across 12 industries the average rating was on the cusp of poor. We have a long way to go when it comes to creating an excellent customer experience.

Creating a customer experience is mostly a cognitive design challenge.  It is driven by the think-and-feel your ads, product interactions and customer service process creates.   It is as much about the psychology of customer-facing employees as it is understanding the mind of the consumer.  Most businesses are run on a transactional basis and are not optimized to meet psychological needs. Indeed, very little cognitive psychology has worked its way into the management paradigm.  So I am always on the lookout for studies that demonstrate the transactional importance of psychological factors.

For example, a recent study at Ohio State University, Got Up on the Wrong Side of the Bed,  demonstrates that the mood you start your work day with can impact performance.

 ”Researchers found that employees’ moods when they clocked in tended to affect how they felt the rest of the day. Early mood was linked to their perceptions of customers and to how they reacted to customers’ moods.”

The impact on performance was measured by a change in both volume and quality of work.  Cognitive factors were key. For example, high-positive mood produced greater verbal fluency (fewer pauses, stumbles and “ums”) which reduced call time and received a higher rating. The study was done with telephone customer service personnel.

The researchers suggest a little mood management might go a long way towards improving the customer experience. What does your organization do to lift the mood (or avoid souring it) at the start of each day?

Designs that put us to sleep, literally, are an important application area for cognitive designers. Sleeping well is essential for brain health and peak cognitive performance.  Not sleep well impacts mood, relationships and work performance. Lack of sleep creates brain fog.

The problem (or opportunity) is huge.  According the National Sleep Foundation’s 2011 sleep in America Poll, 63% of American’s say their sleep needs are not being met.  Seems like we have developed a wide range of behaviors that inhibit sleep or degrade its quality. From using light emitting screens after dusk, to eating big meals, not sticking to a sleep schedule and too little physical activity all contribute to poor sleep. Sleeping well is a major behavior change challenge.

We have designed our lives to go at full speed.

The National Sleep Foundation is an excellent resource on the causes of cures for our sleep troubles. What we need are designs that entice us to make the necessary behavior changes.

For example, imagine a simple smart phone app that prompts us with a daily nudge (or knowledge card) suggesting a small but important sleep-friendly behavior.

We seek to change behavior (stop, start, avoid starting) in order to achieve some outcome such as better health, more savings, superior customer service, killer communications and the like. There are only five pathways for achieving and sustaining a behavior change:

1. Eliminate the need to change behavior but still achieve the outcome.  For example, healthy foods well disguised as your favorite snack. I can continue to eat the same food but am now emulating healthier eating habits.

2. Engineer hard stops or gos into the environment that make it impossible to do unwanted behaviors or avoid desired behaviors. For example, no more vending machines in schools.

3. Engineer soft stops or gos into the environment that nudge us towards the preferred behaviors. For example, making healthy choices easier to see and access in the lunch line.

4. Provide guidance or support to individuals as they go through the process of learning the new behaviors from experience. For example, joining Weight Watchers.

5. Observe individuals with advanced skills in self-regulation as they work solo through the process of learning the new behaviors from experience.  For example, losing weight on your own.  20-25% of the population have this capacity and more can develop it.

From a cognitive design standpoint we can see how the different pathways leverage insights into the nature of decision-making, self-regulation or control, learning from experience, self efficacy and individual autonomy.  For example, the first three pathways (eliminate,  hard and soft) focus on changing the environment. As such the need for self-control is minimized and learning is at the stimulus-response level. But ethical issues can emerge as these pathways may impinge on individual liberty and personal choice. They work well in case were there are clear safety concerns and behavior changes are not complex (e.g. healthcare workers washing their hands).

The last two pathways on the other hand (guided, solo) involve the much higher cognitive load associated with self regulation and learning new mental models from experience but are unavoidable when we need to master more complex behavior changes.

I have yet to find a behavior change program that does not follow one or several of these pathways.  Even work on the cutting edge seems to fit. Take for example, the recent story in the Wall Street Journal about how food scientists are designing foods to trick our brains into thinking we are full:

“Nestle, one of the world’s largest food companies, hopes to develop new types of foods that, essentially, seek to trick the gut brain. The foods could make people feel full earlier, or stay full longer, in order to curb the desire to eat more. For example, cooking french fries in oil that gets digested more slowly than regular oil could confer a longer-lasting sense of satiety, researchers speculate.”

The gut brain refers to the large neural mass in our gut sometimes called the second brain. Designs that satiate in this way are an example of the first pathway – eliminate. I am redesigning the environment to eliminate the need to change behavior. It happens automatically.

Very interested to hear about behavior change programs or approaches that don’t seem to fit into the five pathways framework.

Watch someone deeply engrossed in a good novel, video game, Sudoku math puzzle or a Rubik’s cube. They are happily, even joyfully exerting massive mental effort. They do so without apparent stress because each of the items  mentioned delivers more mental energy in the form of novelty, meaning,  emotions and associations than it consumes in the form of decision making, cognitive load and self control. These effects work for group activities too as the all-to-addictive smart phone and online virtual worlds have demonstrated. The mental energy we get from technology-mediated but instant and robust social interaction is tremendous.  Millions of people are spending more time with their phones and in virtual worlds than any place else!

Organizations are still struggling to figure out how to harness mental energy and design work that release the potential of the Human brain.

The best results recently are crowdsourcing and open innovation.  In this case tasks and jobs are thrown open to anyone with an Internet connection and those that get net mental energy from doing them will self select. Efforts to gamify work, or redesign processes to include game-like features that drive up mental energy, are also on the rise.  Gamification is a powerful generator of mental energy and will surely impact the nature of work.

If you have any doubts on the importance of understanding the details of mental energy for improving knowledge work check out the post: Vastly Improve Mental Focus with Switching. It reports recent research that suggests maintaining cognitive performance on a task over time is more about spending a few seconds switching to a task that gives us a burst of mental energy or novelty than it is taking a rest break.   Deactivating and then reactivating goals rather than decreasing focus actually generates mental energy to help maintain focus.

We are hardwired from our brain chemistry up to our social nature to relentlessly seek mental energy.  In the life sciences mental energy is defined as the capacity and motivation to do cognitive work coupled with a subjective feeling of fatigue or vigor. Researchers in cognitive science and human factors have identified a handful of key variables that drive mental energy.  Tapping this emerging science to improve organizational performance is what the cognitive design blog is all about.

Analytics involves using data and math to make decisions and run the organization.  With current technologies, oceans of data and advanced simulation and statical techniques what analytics means for all aspects of business – strategy, marketing, product development, innovation, customer service and real time operations – can be profound. That is one of the key findings in a new report, Analytics: The New Path to Value,  from MIT’s Sloan School of Business and IBM. The study emphasizes that top performer see analytics as a differentiator and they achieve value, not so much by mastering data and technology but by doing good design.

“The adoption barriers organizations face most are related to management and culture rather than being related to data and technology. The leading obstacle to widespread analytics adoption is lack of understanding of how to use analytics to improve the business, according to almost four of 10 respondents. More than one in three cite lack of management bandwidth due to competing priorities. Organizations that use analytics to tackle their biggest challenges are able to overcome seemingly intractable cultural challenges and, at the same time, refine their data and governance approaches.”

Developing the shared mental models needed to crank value from analytics is a cognitive design challenge.  It requires a keen understanding of how managers really think including the cognitive biases involved in decision-making. It also means skill in using visualization, scenarios and other techniques to lower the cognitive load of data complexity.  If we don’t shape the practices of analytics on the basis of how minds really work there is little chance of creating value from it.

In my philosophy of business workshop I argue that the most costly philosophical mistake management scholars and practitioners in the West make is differentiating thought and action.  It is true that an artificial distinction between thinking and doing enhanced management control and predictability in the industrial era.  But things have changed and we forgot the distinction is artificial.  Now that knowledge and creativity are key the distinction leads to poor decision-making about job design, planned organizational change and innovation to name just a few areas.   And it runs deep – plan versus implement, strategy versus operations, design versus construction, research versus manufacture and thinkers versus doers. 

When we try to learn or innovate, the current distinction between thinking and doing is most harmful. This is why techniques such as prototyping and ethnographic study in design or constructionism in education produce interesting results. They combine thinking, making and observing in deep and natural ways.

John Maeda, the new president of the Rhode Island School of Design and former head of MIT’s media lab, made a related point recently in Seed Magazine.

“After two decades as a student and faculty member at MIT, my newest experience at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) has reawakened me to the world of physical creation. RISD represents the ultimate culture of makers. There is no greater integrity, no greater goal achieved, than an idea articulately expressed through something made with your hands. We call this constant dialogue between eye, mind, and hand “critical thinking—critical making.” It’s an education in getting your hands dirty, in understanding why you made what you made, and owning the impact of the work in the world. It’s what artists and designers do. ”

He is making a broader argument for injecting art and design into science education to take the engine of innovation in the US to the next level. The idea is to go beyond our technology-centric approach to innovation by adding art, emotion and intuition into the process.  To do this we must integrate thinking and making.  

Critical (Thinking + Making) = Innovation Squared because it is one way to smash the artificial distinction between thinking and doing.

Image Source: Blogging Innovation