Cognitive Design

Check out the new game on Facebook called Healthseeker.  It was designed to use the psychological power of social game play to encourage healthier eating habits and lifestyle choices. 

The picth is that getting healthier (more specifically managing diabetes risk) can be fun and happen with a little help from your friends.  You select goals, chose a mission, earn experience points, give kudos, win badges, send challenges to friends and all the other social network dynamics that move heart-and-mind so well for hundreds of millions of people.  The game is new. It has approximately 4000 members and 400 fans.  The best description I have found so far is on Technology Review:

The challenge of this kind of game isn’t to convince people of something but to get them to act. “People are already emotionally committed to their health,” says Michael Fergusson, the founder and CEO of Ayogo. “They know they need to eat better and exercise.” But approaching that challenge all at once can seem overwhelming and thankless. “We pay them to take healthy actions,” says Fergusson. Reinforcing those small actions could turn them into habits that add up to better health.

They also discuss how other social games are changing behaviors.  Healthseeker is an important experiment. We need more like it.

How can we use the features and functions of online interaction (social networks, online 3D worlds, etc.) that have proven cognitive impact to encourage behavior change for individual and social good?

In an earlier post, we explored PatientsLikeMe, a unique site for crowdsourcing patient data in great quantitative detail.  The idea is that patients share tons of personal health data by tracking symptoms, lab results, interventions and the outcomes produced in quantitative form. This creates a river of data for helping each other and is invaluable for researchers, insurers, drug companies and medical device companies looking to develop better health solutions.   An exciting and potential disruptive way to crowdsource health innovations.

But will an open source approach to clinical research catch on, especially will all the concerns about privacy?  It looks like it is. Check out CureTogether. They have 13,000 members in 112 countries contributing 1.2 million data points on 600 conditions.  All the data is supplied by patients. They are actively leveraging that it in 6 university-based studies. It is interesting to note that the most active area is anxiety with some 2000 members.

Patient sourcing (patients working on cures through a crowdsourcing model), especially when it is quantitative can change the time, cost and quality of clinical research by a factor of 10. As they point out on the website capturing quantitative is the key:

“CureTogether is about quantifying the collective patient experience. While most other patient support sites have focused on stories or information from experts, we focus on quantitative data across over 600 patient-contributed conditions. Individual data is kept private, but the anonymized aggregate data is shared openly to maximize discoveries that can be made.”

Obviously this involves considerable work for patients.  But the return on effort is outstanding.  Members get unique advice, daily encouragement and the opportunity to contribute to something of major importance. Powerful cognitive design.

David Rose gave a very interesting talk on how to change behavior at Transform 2010: Thinking Differently About Healthcare.  He found (through 10 years of work) that if we scrap the right information off the screens of our computers, smart phones and tablets and make it available in everyday objects behaviors will change.  This allows us to monitor things we are interested in – stock market, weather, our health- more frequently with very little cognitive load. It also means creating a special purpose device or remaking existing objects so that they are capable of information display. He calls these enchanted objects:

“The best metaphor that’s really driven me over the last 10 years or so is the idea of the “enchanted object.” This is the next logical step from Ishii’s “Things That Think” concept of ubiquitous computing: the functionality of computation and the representation of information and of communication will be embedded in many everyday objects. They will seem to be a little bit magical—delightfully easy to use and adding value to our lives a little bit at a time.”

One example, covered previously on the the Cognitive Design blog is GlowCaps or remade drug bottle caps that flash and play a ringtone when you need to take a med, automatically reorders and sends email alerts and reports to doctors and family members all designed to maximize medication compliance.

Other examples include – displays at bus stops that shows when the next bus is due to arrive, umbrellas that beep when rain is likely and a personal orb that glows to deliverable a signal the is customized to your behavior change needs.

Service failure is a serious affair. Approximately 15% of front line service workers report experiencing daily abuse from angry customers that feel the company has somehow failed them.   How well the organization recovers from service failures – from both the service worker and customer perspectives – can mean big bucks. Not surprising, effective service recovery is a matter of cognitive design requiring good insight into how the minds of employees and customers really work. So I am always on the lookout for new scientific studies with designable insights.

Take for example, recent research from the University of Bath, Brands that Promise the World Make Consumers Feel Betrayed.   Researchers found that marketing that over promises can result in customers taking service failures as a personal affront. You tell someone they are special, like family or even a king and then don’t treat them that way when they arrive. This generates consumer conflict – angry, abusive and resentful behavior. Recovering from that is very different from what must be done with customers that frame service failure in a task-based way or as a matter of procedural failure not personal affront.

More specifically:

“Consumers who frame conflict in a task-based way are more focused on ensuring a practical outcome and less likely to become angry. They’re more receptive to genuine efforts by the company to restore the service and more likely to continue with the relationship…..

For consumers who frame conflict in a personal way offering compensation or restoring the service can actually make things worse. It’s more about admitting fault and going off script to acknowledge they’re in the wrong and apologise.”

This has clear implications for cognitive designers working on service recovery processes and training.

McKinsey just released 2010 results of their global survey on innovation and commercialization. It is all good news for the cognitive designer.

First, 84% of the executives asked indicated that innovation was extremely or very important for their firm.  This should create strong demand for designers able to create new products, services and experiences that meet the cognitive needs of customers in simplified or unique ways.

Second, as firms turn towards innovation-based growth strategies they are facing the same organizational barriers that they have tried to overcome many times before. According to the survey:

Further, many of the challenges—finding the right talent, encouraging collaboration and risk taking, organizing the innovation process from beginning to end—are remarkably consistent. Indeed, surveys over the past few years suggest that the core barriers to successful innovation haven’t changed, and companies have made little progress in surmounting them.

While the suggested improvements  in the article are strong – formalize the prioritization process and link innovation to strategic planning – they miss the mark. Past efforts to enable organizational innovation have failed because we have neglected the cognitive factors. From a cognitive design standpoint the key questions are:

How do the minds of organizational innovators really work? What psychological needs, work practices, cognitive biases and mental models make them tick?

We need to answer these questions for all the key stakeholder groups – executives overseeing innovation, employee innovators, customer co-innovators and supplier collaborators.

                       Image source: Innovation Playground 

Not having these answers will result in poorly designed innovation programs and processes. Take for example this survey finding:

 As in the past, executives have the most difficulty stopping ideas at the right time, with only 26 percent of respondents to this survey saying they do this well.

I can try to stop ideas at the right time by designing a formal approach to prioritization but that will have little impact if I don’t understand the cognitive biases at work in setting and following priorities especially when “pet ideas” are involved.

Innovation at both the individual and organizational level is an inherently cognitive-political process.  No matter what programs and processes we design to stimulate it, the cognitive (intellectual, emotional, volitional and motivational) needs and political realities of the key stakeholder groups must be well understood and satisfied. This puts the cognitive designer center stage.

Just organizations treat employees fairly. Generating feelings and thoughts of fairness in employees requires making decisions and taking actions that produce favorable outcomes and/or use processes that involve employees, create a level playing field and provide clear explanations of why.   To maintain a sense of fairness when everyone cannot receive a favorable outcome means using processes that are inclusive, consistent and clear.  Up to a point, high process fairness is very important for maintaining organizational justice at crunch time or when outcomes are very unfavorable – layoffs, budget cuts and work-life imbalances.

Crunch time in organizational justice presents many cognitive design challenges.   Such situations carry a strong emotional charge (guilt, sympathy, fear) and can have subtle cognitive side effects.  For example, you can accidentally and negatively impact employee self esteem or create survival guilt with high process fairness.

Further, bad news carries tremendous cognitive load. One that authorities delivering the news might not be able to handle well enough to maintain high process fairness.  There are several other cognitive factors inhibiting manager from following high process fairness including lack of belief that they will do much good and a natural reluctance to surrender power. These issues are covered well in the new book Contemporary Look at Organizational Justice: Multiply Insult Times Injury. It is a bit academic but the free chapter is on practical applications.

When outcomes are bad our brains go into overdrive on many levels. Not attending to the cognitive factors at crunch time strongly diminishes our ability to treat employees fairly and maintain a sense of organizational justice. This is especially the case if we design high-fairness processes that fail to account for how the mind of the managers naturally works. They won’t get implemented.  

The case for this is made fairly strongly in the book. Indeed, the author calls it the Paradox of Process Fairness.  It is a paradox because the business case for process fairness during crunch time is good yet the evidence suggests we don’t use it. We don’t use it because we have failed to design high fairness processes that meet the cognitive needs of managers. We create the conditions of fairness for employees – involvement, level playing field, clarity of explanation but leave managers with a sometime unbearable cognitive load, no response to their belief that it does not work, naive demand to share power and the like.

The challenge for cognitive designers working in the field of organizational justice is to create high process fairness that meets the psychological needs of both employees and managers.

Systems that remotely monitor the movements, weight, blood pressure, compliance with medication schedules and other daily behaviors of older adults are springing up. For children with older parents experiencing failing health such systems mean high-tech eldercare from afar. For the parents it means a chance to age in place.

Take for example, the BeClose system.

Add some smart software into the mix as they do in the QuietCare system and you can infer a lot about what is going on:

“Have they gotten out of bed in the morning?

Have they navigated the bathroom safely?

Have they eaten?

Have they taken their medicine?

What’s their overall activity level?

Are they sleeping well?”

But technology is only part of the story. Successful deployment and use requires close attention to human factors and good cognitive design.   A recent article in the New York Times brings this to a sharp point:

“Many of the systems are godsends for families. But, as with any parent-child relationship, all loving intentions can be tempered by issues of control, role-reversal, guilt and a little deception — enough loaded stuff to fill a psychology syllabus. For just as the current population of adults in their 30s and 40s have built a reputation for being a generation of hyper-involved, hovering parents to their own children, they now have the tools to micro-manage their aging mothers and fathers as well.”

The article makes the point that remote monitoring eldercare systems are meeting cognitive needs on both sides of the fence:

In addition to giving him peace of mind that his mother is fine, the system helps assuage that midlife sense of guilt. “I have a large amount of guilt,” Mr. Murdock admitted. “I’m really far away. I’m not helping to take care of her, to mow her lawn, to be a good son.”

The article does a good job of raising some of the key cognitive design issues but it is far from clear how they can be resolved.

MIT’s journal, Sloan Management Review, has an outstanding article that highlights why we must do cognitive design to get excellent customer service. The article, Designing for the Softer Side of Customer Service,  demonstrates how three psychological variables – trust, emotions and feelings of control shape the modern service experience.  They provide a good theoretical frame, new research and many specific suggestions such as:

“Service providers should categorize events based on the type of emotion and the source. When negative events are caused by the company, quick recovery is vital. When they are caused by external agents, the company can generate good will by either being supportive when the emotions are negative or celebrating with the customer when the emotions are positive”.

Interested to hear from readers that have implemented service innovations designed to leverage  trust, emotions or feelings of control.

Online or virtual worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft are a new type of socio-technical system. They are technical platforms that provide computer-mediated social interactions of serious depth and breadth.   Literally millions of people participate many spending in excess of 20 hours per week online.  Users stay loyal for years. Some online worlds support virtual economies that spill over into real dollars. Over a billion real dollars have been spent on virtual goods, skills, experience points and level ups!

The opportunities for cognitive designers are vast.   Testing new designs in a virtual world and using online worlds to tackle hard cognitive design problems (lasting behaviors change, knowledge worker productivity, product/service innovation, enhancing brain function) are two major areas of opportunities.  Another is that online worlds have matured as socio-technical systems enough to offer some deep insights (design patterns) for cognitive designers.  To get a taste for that I suggest you spend sometime in country. Join a community and earn some experience points.  

Another approach is to look at the growing literature. One of my favorites is Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and Virtual.  Chapter eleven reveals an important design pattern:

“Most MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) attempt to foster interactions between their players by using a common template, which could be stereotyped as follows:

(1) the player creates a “level 1” character who enters the world with a limited set of abilities and equipment;

(2) the player is presented with “quests” (missions) to accomplish;

(3) successful completion of the objectives generates “experience points” (or any other similar reward), allowing the character to acquire more powerful abilities and/or equipment;

(4) (this is the most important design element) as a player gains in levels, quests become increasingly difficult to accomplish alone, reaching a point where a coordinated group of players is required to move further;

(5) the size of the group required, the length of the quests or dungeons, and the complexity of the encounters make it nearly impossible to succeed with an ad hoc group assembled on the spot, creating the need for more formal and persistent social structures: the guilds (or clans, teams, etc. in other game worlds).”

There are many ways a clever cognitive designer can put this to use even in the real world.

Interested to hear from readers with some significant virtual world time. What opportunities for cognitive designers do you see?

The Sekai Camera is a free smart phone App that locates, tags and provides information about the scene in your camera view. It also lets you “air tag” or provide descriptions and comments (text, pictures, icons, etc.) on the scene.  Additional features include a life-log.

A bit crude but it is an important first generation augmented reality application using the mobile web. One more example of how we are breaking down the barrier between the digital and physical worlds.

I invite cognitive designers to experiment with the Sekai Camera and suggest ideas for how it can be adapted to create lasting behavior change, improve organizational performance,  create a differentiated think-and-FEEL for existing products and services or enhance an individuals cognitive performance.