Cognitive Design

   In cognitive design we want artifacts that are tuned to support, enhance or even create a particular frame of mind (thoughts + emotions).  One push back I get on this is everybody thinks and feels differently so how can you design for more than one person? This is where the cognitive science comes in – there is a lot of common ground in the way we think and feel and that can be used to build up psychographic profiles that segment a market or define target groups.  Psychographic profiles define groups of people that are operating on a shared mental model, cognitive bias, metaphor, decision heuristic, learning style, emotional trigger or other combination cognitive psychological characteristics that have enough discriminating power to generate meaningful classification.  The work of cognitive design is to link the psychographic profile to behaviors and ultimately to product features and functions.  

  There are not well developed out-of-the-box psychographic profiles.  Investing in developing accurate psychographic profiles for your markets is well worth the effort because it provides the insights needed to drive waves of innovation and possibly competitive advantage.

  Take mental models for example. Mental models (long the focus of cognitive scientists) define how we think and feel about a particular thing/event/agent in the world. So I have a mental model about families, trees, cars, mountains, bosses and the like. Mental models are grounded in my experience and values. They include attitudes which can generate emotions. For example, my mental model of snakes includes attitudes that invoke the emotion of fear.  Understanding a group in terms of the mental models they share – especially as they relate to products and services, can be a powerful foundation for psychographics. So the question becomes, how do we discover shared mental models?

  Most techniques start by eliciting the individuals’ mental model and then aggregating those using a technique for measuring similarity to define the common or shared mental model.  The end result is a “concept map” that defines the thought/feelings that make up the model and how they related to each other. Some example techniques:

1. The ACSMM method that measures similarity based on the number of nodes and links that the individual mental models have in common  

2. The ZMET technique that uses images and metaphors to elicit individual and discover shared mental models

3. Pathfinder networks that use a statistical analysis of pair-wise comparisons by individuals to establish a graphic theoretic measure of similarity to discover the shared model  

  For a brief comparative overview of many of the major techniques see the study by Johnson and others.  For the most part, these are research-based techniques and represent the “big gun” in psychographics.  They are not commonly used by marketing and product development groups. My bet is that they (or more streamlined versions of them) will be.   Just as you drive business decisions based on demographics today, you will drive business decision based on psychographics in the future.

 Designing to change behavior is the toughest challenge in cognitive design. This is especially true when it comes to designing products, services and communications to change health-related behavior including following the doctor’s advice to manage diabetes and other chronic conditions.

 A new article in the LA Times,  A Health Message Listeners can Relate To,   describes the effectiveness of using soap-opera themed stories to achieve changes in health-related behaviors.

Stories convey important learning without having to work at it (low cognitive load). They are fun to repeat.  Soap operas are the best structure to use for many health applications  because they engage us in social learning or learning by observing (or hearing about) other people’s behavior. We are automatically programmed (or hardwired) to do this. This is why we ask leaders to be an example (model behaviors for employees) and your mom worries about who you hang out with (vicarious learning from your peer group).  Further, soap operas by design “super size” (without lapsing into a parody) human drama giving them hard, deep and potential lasting emotion impact.

Because they have low cognitive load, invoke the powerful force of social learning and have over-sized emotional and psychological content they can be powerful devices for changing behavior.

Traditionally, how a customer thinks and feels about a product is the domain of advertising, marketing and branding.   But now, in cognitive design, we have made the customer’s frame of mind (set of mental states) part of what is being designed.  Design now includes functionality, usability and mentality (frame of mind).  Of course customers are always free to “make up their own minds” but cognitive design seeks to create artifacts that are optimized to support and enhance a particular frame of mind that she chooses to be in. Simple example – when going to the movies do I want to laugh (see a comedy) be scared (see a horror flick) or think deeply (see a drama).  Designing for cognition has a long tradition in art, entertainment and luxury products.  What is new?  

We now have untapped science-based insights into how minds work that will radically extend the scope and effectiveness of cognitive design (promise and peril). 

   Designing to achieve specific mental states in all artifacts means we are blurring the lines between advertising, marketing and product/service development as never before. For example, the EEG systems used to measure thoughts and feelings  that I’ve mentioned in this blog before can be used not only to assess the effectiveness of ads but also to test design concepts long before and product is built.  There are many implications to the merging of marketing and product development through cognitive design.

   One immediate opportunity is to look at the tools marketers have used to win mindshare and see how they can be adapted to design. Not surprising, marketers have been on the forefront of applied cognitive psychology. Recent innovations include metaphor and archetypes in marketing, cognitive bias in consumer decision making, viral marketing (applying the concept of ideas virus and memetics), customer mental models, emotional intelligence in selling and of course neuromarketing or the use of fMRI and EEG machines (clinical equipment) to “read out” a customers thoughts and emotions (among other things).   Thanks to human factor specialists, designers can tune functionality to improve usability. Perhaps the cognitive design specialist, adapting lessons from marketing, can now assist product developers with tuning functionality to improve mentality (a set of mental states). Said another way, the breakthrough that cognitive design promises may be rooted in giving the marketer more direct access and influence over product/service functionality.

Even better would be to bring the engineers, product developers, human factor specialists, designers and marketers together in common design framework and methodology that takes a holistic and human-centric approach to achieving functionality, usability and mentality.

In nearly every talk I give on cognitive design someone asks about designing for trust. This includes offerings to create and maintain the trust of customers as well as management practices to create and maintain trust with employees.

This is a great design question to ask because trust is a complex cognitive relationship we establish over time with people and a wide variety of artifacts.  My answer takes the form of a simple recipe:

A.  Be sure to include the 7 features of trustworthy products in a way that customers feel 

   

B.  Give products and services a trusting “personality” when possible

 

C.  Establish a service recovery process that restores the customer’s perception of justice 

 Research shows I tend to trust products/services that are:  

• * Reliable (perform in a predicable way across circumstances)

• * Transparent or easy to understand

• * Under my control (options, personalization, easy termination)

• * Secure and safe (won’t hurt me or let me hurt myself)

• * Insures my privacy (to the degree I want it)

• * Have guarantees (a form of promised service recovery)

• * Are self maintaining or automatically  serviced by the provider

On the surface, most of these features seem to be a matter of engineering and usability. But how I establish the cognition (feeling) for each of these factors is key and very much depends on the industry context. For example, years ago Progressive Insurance started offering a free and easy to use quoting service that shared the cost of their policies and the cost of their competitor’s policies even when Progressive’s policies were more expensive. This was a bold move in establishing the cognition of trust in an industry that has had low levels of consumer trust.  It clearly telegraphed – we are not trying to hide our prices (transparency) – and gave consumers a level of control and understanding that was otherwise hard to obtain.  They establish a mutual interest with consumers – understanding the comparative price of policies even to their potential detriment. If we have a mutual interest, and you show a reasoned willingness to go may way on occasion, I can trust you.

Products with personality or those that have features that cause me attribute human-like qualities to them may play a special role in creating and maintain trust. There is some data that suggest people see simple geometrically styled products as “sensible and trustworthy”. Other more personified products that talk to us (cars) or are stylized after living or imaginary characters (e.g. cartoon characters) may in fact invoke cognitions that lead to higher levels of trust (my speculation).  The development of avartars or 2-dimensional representations of personalities for customer service (an animated figure that moves, gestures and speaks with you) over the web is one experiment along these lines.  Well designed service avatars run on a touch of artificial intelligence and do well at understanding natural language. Check out the article about Jenn a service Avatar for Alaska Airlines.

We can now develop customized avatars (and buddy icons) to express dimensions of our own personality for many online interactions (email, instant messaging, social networking, games, etc.). This is powerful cognitive design medicine.  After all, if I can’t trust myself (even as an avatar) who can I trust?

Cognitive design for trust is really put to the test during service recovery. When a product or service fails, consumer expectations and trust are betrayed. How I recover form this betrayal strongly determines how much I should be trusted in the future (assuming the breach is not consistent or acute) Organizations seek to recover that trust by “making things right again” through a service recovery process.  Some researchers argue that service recovery is mediated by emotions. According to the appraisal theory of emotions – emotional states are generated when we assess (or appraise) a situation’s fit with our goals, beliefs and values. Clearly, in the case of a service failure the essence of the situation is a negative appraisal and attending emotional states. But how can we characterize these emotions in a way that helps us design a better service recovery process? 

An interesting a recent answer to this question is that we can characterize the design problem in terms of restoring “perceived justice”. According to Chi Kin (Bennett) Yim and co-authors, consumers want three types of percieved justice in a service recovery process: procedural (a compliant process that is easy to access, fast and transparent), interactional (treated with fairness, empathy, courtesy during the process) and distributional (compensated for the service failure).  The study suggested that positive outcomes in service recovery (e.g. continued customer loyalty) were mostly driven by distributional justice or the compensation given because of the failure.  From a cognitive design perspective this is not surprising as it demonstrates that the organization is “putting its money where its mouth is”.  

Being nice to me is one thing (and expected) but showing that you are willing to give me something that reflects a shared value is a big step in re-establishing trust.

Working out a calculus for distributional justice is no easy matter. Over compensation during service recovery can lead to consumer guilt, under compensation can lead to anger.  Time-to-compensation and who delivers it (e.g. high ranking official or the clerk that made me mad) may also be important variables.  The corporate mindset may also impose the ideas that all customers must be treated identically during service recovery.

 The art of cognitive design for service recovery is found in the specifics of the what-and-how customers are compensated for a failure. It need not be complex – Domino’s Pizza is delivered in 30 minutes or it is free.

 Blunders in service recovery may lead to serious customer defection (although I have found no research to support that). Service recovery is like a second chance it the relationship. You mess that up and how can I trust you?

Peer production or the development of valuable products and content by users over the Internet for free is not a fad.  Web-based “mass collaboration” is producing quality encyclopedias, production-level software products, authoritative books, professional-quality citizen journalism (news photos, stories and even shows), stock picks that beat the market and even assisting in the search for extraterrestrial life.  

Talented people are working hard, really hard, and regularly for free (no direct economic compensation).  Collaborating, innovating and problem-solving like mad – all thing we have tried to make happen on the other side of the fire wall using knowledge management with little real success for the last 20 years.  

Why are they doing this and how can we harness it inside the firewall?  Asked another way, what is the cognition that drives peer production (user generated content) and how can we apply it in the workplace?   This is a timely question because corporations are starting to invest in employee applications of Web 2.0 technologies in the hope of stimulating productivity and innovation. Results might be disappointing if we don’t understand the motivation and cognition that is driving the behavior. Fortunately, there has been a little research.

McKinsey has published several papers on Web 2.0 and how corporations can make the most of user generated content. (You need to sign up for a guest pass to access the article.)  One key finding:

“We observed that users cite a variety of reasons for posting content online—chief among them, a hunger for fame, the urge to have fun, and a desire to share experiences with friends.”

Recognition, fun and sharing with friends is good but it is really powerful when it is driven by the modifiers “hunger”, “urge” and “desire”.   More fundamental psychology than what we normally see in the workplace. And I don’t think they are getting that because of the functionality of the tool or even the topic that is being worked on. It is more the law of large numbers. Because the task is cast over the Internet it is possible for those few people that are really highly motivated to “self select” and participate in a robust way. You will likely not be able to duplicate that effect in corporations, even very large corporations.

That does not mean that blogs, wikis, social networking and the like won’t improve communication in corporations. They will. What it does mean is that Web 2.0 technologies should not be viewed as a knowledge management silver bullet. Instead we should see them as another tool that needs to be considered very carefully from a cognitive design standpoint.  

Pieter Desmet has done important work on modeling product emotions.  A few key ideas from his work:

·        Product experience is made up of three components including aesthetic pleasure, attribution of meaning, and emotional response (follows Hekkert)

·        Individual differences in emotional response to products cannot be explained by age or gender but more by culture (Dutch, Japanese and US were compared in his dissertation) 

·        Individual’s emotional responses to products vary but the process of eliciting emotions is universal so you need to understand context (goals, standards, attitudes of users)

He has developed and successfully used a tool for measuring emotional reactions that queues on 14 different states including: 

Unpleasant: Indignation, Contempt, Disgust, Unpleasant surprise, Dissatisfaction, Disappointment, Boredom and Pleasant: Desire, Pleasant surprise, Inspiration,  Amusement,  Admiration, Satisfaction, Fascination.

Feedback is collected via the use of cartoon/icon expressions of the emotion and reports that you have, somewhat have or do not have that emotion when interacting with the product.

This is one of the few research-based and field tested tools for designing emotions that I have found.  Watch for a review of his book, Designing Emotions, in this blog later in the year.

I recently gave a talk to a group of HR/OD professionals at a Fortune 200 company on what cognitive design can do to enhance organizational effectiveness. One topic that really caught fire was how to redesign (from a cognitive perspective) the HR and management policies in large organizations. As organizations mature policies that are put into place (on how to make decisions and what behaviors are appropriate) can easily evolve into a web of rules, revisions and exceptions that borders on the complexity of the  U.S. tax code.  In such cases the policies create a massive cognitive load on the organization.  Non-compliance, decision errors and unintended consequences can be common place.  On the other hand, a well designed set of policies can make a fundamental contribution to the profitability and competitiveness of the firm.

Cognitive designers can help by emphasizing policies that:

1. Can be applied in a way that fit how managers and employees think (low cognitive load)

2. Safeguard against cognitive biases in managerial decision making

3. Naturally reflect the principles at work in the culture.

Expanding on the first point, policies that fit the way people think typically:

• * Provide examples that contain the answers to the most frequently encountered case – this lets me “blink” or reason by pattern matching.

• * Are resolved by “one good reason” – this lets me make single factor decision the simplest decision heuristic.

• * Invoke sequential reasoning or “rules of thumb” applied in a specific order – this lets me take a cookbook approach and avoid complex branching logic that overloads.

• * Use prioritized and binary branching logic – this lets me work through a complex decision space in otherwise  “fast and frugal” way by answering yes/no questions with the important ones asked first.

These guidelines, based on the last 20 years of research in naturalistic decision-making,  represent increasing degrees of cognitive load including, blinking (no thinking), single rule reaction (little thinking or no thinking), sequential reasoning (little thinking if rules are simple and have a natural order) to more complex decision making.   

The rules-of-the-road for making decisions at a traffic intersection is a good example of a single reason sequential decision making design. You know the story – if a policeman is directing traffic you follow their hand signs. Baring that and given a traffic light you obey that. Absence direction by a policeman, traffic light (or sign) the first person to the intersection has the right-of-way and so on.   All the rules are based on a single factor and are executed in sequence. It would be easy to overcomplicate the situation and design policies for age of the driver, size or type of vehicle, time of day and an endless series of other important sounding variables.  The result would be a lot more accidents and delays.

The rules-of-the-road example also illustrates how policies can reflect principles at work – in this case by respecting authority and being courteous. Linking policy to values (aka principles) in a natural way increases alignment and lowers cognitive load even further.

These cognitive design guidelines can be applied to the development of any type of policies or rules meant to shape behavior and decision-making. They don’t tell you what the policy should say but instead emphasize how it should be said (structured) to make sure they fit with the way our minds work. A body of policies or rules is an artifact that should be designed to support and enhance cognition.

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.

 In an earlier post I talked about reverse engineering things that make our minds race as a technique for doing cognitive design. I highlighted an article from Wired that talked about how the game model is being applied to the design of many different things. Now Businessweek has picked up on the issue with an article titled:

Rules of the Game: Funware brings gaming features to consumer applications like photo-sharing and social networking.

One example:   “PhotoAttack, you must quickly describe images as they fly at you. “Funny,” “cute,” “sexy,”—and so on. The more your tags match those of other users, the higher your score. You can invite friends to play the game with your images, though you can also choose who views what—and tags can later be exported to other photo-sharing sites. As the game is played again and again by users, the quality of each tag improves.”

Note the clever use of both game features and collaborative tagging (folksonomy style) to help solve the problem of organizing large online stores of photos. Not clear if it will work yet but it seems like a very clever cognitive design. If you are struggling with the cognition of organizing your photos give it a try at rmbr (when they are done with beta testing).

A reader offered interesting new research from Washington State University on the use of cues in advertising designed to invoke “nostalgic reflection” in consumers. Key finding:

“… personal thought patterns are, indeed, inspired among those presented with an ad containing nostalgic cues. Further, the researchers found that those who experienced nostalgic thoughts tended to exhibit more favorable attitudes toward the advertised brand than those who did not.”  

The research also provides some evidence for the “aestheticization of nostalgia” (experiencing nostalgia even if the artifact is not part of my personal past) mentioned in the previous post.