Cognitive Design

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:

1. 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.)

2. Decide between reminding users of “the past”, something in the past, or something in their past

3. Support the reconstructive aspects of memory (romanticizing the past) in ways that lead to optimal cognitive functioning

4. 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.

EEG Technology for “reading out” the mental states (thoughts and feelings) of users as they react to the design of a message, video game or other artifact is becoming more accessible.  Earlier we highlighted the work of Emotive systems in this area. Check out EmSense a neuromarketing company with 22 patents pending .  A good overview of their approach including pictures of the technology can be found at VentureBeat.

Yes you can through cleverly designed artifacts called commitment devices.  A commitment device is anything you design to avoid anticipated lapses in self control. Using automatic withdrawals to pay yourself first, surrendering your keys to the bartender to avoid driving after drinking or promising (and being held accountable) to donate money to a worthy cause if you start smoking or overeating are all examples of “devices” designed to insure we follow through with our behavior change commitments.   

The key is to design it so there is no way (or at least no easy way) out and the emotion of the anticipated punishment is greater than the temptation to lapse.  A good way to make sure there is no way out is to relinquish control to others — or in short, outsource it.  

But outsource to whom?   Often we ask friends and family for help keep us on track but this can strain relationships. In extreme cases we can seek professional help (checking yourself into rehab is a commitment device so too is Bariatric surgery). Now there is a new alternative. Check out the website StickK. 

“stickK is a web-based company that helps you achieve your personal goals through “Commitment Contracts.” You create a contract obliging you to achieve a specific goal within a specific time-frame. By doing so, you put your reputation at stake. You may also choose to wager money to give yourself added incentive to succeed. If you do succeed, you get your money back. If you fail, the money is forfeited to charity, or to one of several causes, or to a person of your choosing. stickK’s services are absolutely free.”  

Interestingly, you can also put money at risk to go to an organization that you strongly oppose to avoid the trap of giving up because the money is going to help someone. If StickK works it will give cognitive designers a flexible new tool for building commitment devices into behavior change programs. After all, anticipating and engineering away potential fault states is good design.

Purposefully putting a user in a state of cognitive dissonance can be a design masterstroke. Doing it accidentally can be a disaster.

We enter a mental state of dissonance when we become aware of two or more conflicting beliefs at the same time. It can also happen we perceive a conflict between a belief and action or a thing.  For example,  telling someone a lie when you strongly believe in telling the truth.  Or reflecting on the belief that you are a really smart and accomplished professional while fumbling around trying to learn to operate the latest consumer electronics gadget designed (supposedly) to improve your productivity.

Trying to hold conflicting beliefs in our head hurts. It is hard to do and so we actively seek relief in a number of ways.  In general, we tend to revise (relative importance and/or content) one of the conflicting beliefs until the pressure goes away. Or we laugh — especially if their is a punchline or realization of one — that suddenly releases the tension.  Sometimes dissonance leads to creative insight or even a transformational experience for the user as new consonant (supporting beliefs) are added because the tension causes us to reframe our thinking. Finally, dissonance can be like a permanent link on a web page,  pushed into the background but remaining ready to activate under the right circumstances. “Every time I look at that gadget I get mad”

Some examples that have positive outcomes (usually):

- Gag gifts

- Being videotaped during practice or performance as part of a training program (the artifact) you are taking 

 - A bathroom scale

 As William Lidwell and others point out in their excellent book on Universal Design Principles, cognitive dissonance is a powerful tool to use when designing marketing and advertising materials. They offer the example of AOL free hours campaign as one of the best examples in history. Users are mailed a free CD which they use to set up the service which takes time and energy. This creates lockin at the time the free subscription expires compelling users to form a positive belief about the service (and paying for the subscription).  Why would I invest time and energy (for no compensation) in a crappy service?

So conflicting beliefs properly framed can lead to surprise, humor, flashes and insight, influence decision making or even lead to a change in world view (paradigm shift).  Cognitive dissonance grabs attention, generates arousal (emotional energy) and provides an opportunity to orchestrate high impact experience.  In terms of level of cognitive fit artifacts that make good use of  dissonance often accelerate user cognition (level 4 fit) and those that trigger it accidentally tend to just agitate users (level 1 fit) and fail.

For many Americans the cognition (or thoughts and emotions) involved in spending money are far more enjoyable than the thoughts and emotions involved in saving for retirement. We have a strong (some say overpowering) cognitive bias towards spending rather than savings.  Look at the level of consumer debt and the looming savings crisis and it is safe to say this bias is running us into serious trouble. 

For many consumers, telling them not to spend in order to save and avoid trouble down the road is not enough.  An alternative strategy is to design savings products that work with the cognitive bias rather than ask them to try and fight it .

A great example of this is the American Express One Card.

As of this writing you get 1% of your purchases deposited in a high-yield (5% APY) savings account with no fees. So you literally automatically save while you spend. Note this is very different than a card that gives you cash back. If you get cash back and you are a spender, you will spend it not save it. This card is linked to an FDIC-insured savings account that you can even make extra deposits to if you want.

There is a powerful cognitive design principle at work here. 

When it comes to designing programs or products that require behavior change, make the new behaviors an automatic consequence of something the customer already does (or is very willing to do).

Is this not what lottery tickets do? Consumers hate to pay tax but will gladly do it to buy some hope/excitement of winning big.

Over the last few years there has been a small flurry of books and papers on the “new science of happiness” – an attempt to use neuropsychology and cognitive science to understand what makes us happy and why. Good stuff for cognitive designers interested in creating artifacts that invoke happiness in users.

Check out the Jan-Feb 2007 issue of Harvard Magazine for recent overview.  It covers all the basics and highlights how Harvard’s class on Happiness 101 (actually titled Positive Psychology) was the most popular in 2006 pulling in over 800 students.

A somewhat dated but still excellent source with findings specific enough to guide design can be found in a Time Magazine article The New Science of Happiness.

So what do you do if you what to design artifacts to put users in the mental state of happiness?  You can include features and functions that:

1. Involve or trigger a remembrance of friends and family.  For example, personalization of your PC desktop with a family or baby photo, discount calling plans for friends and families and adding online social networking features to your software product or content.

2. Allow users to otherwise engage in an acts of kindness or altruistic acts.  Interesting recent examples include XO (the give one get one laptop) and Free Rice (play a vocabulary game and for each word you get right they donate 20 grains of rice through the UN to help end World hunger).

3. Naturally limit (but not eliminate) the number of choices the user must make to use the product (too much choice is the enemy of happiness). For example, some financial services companies have adopted the “option packages” strategy from the automotive industry to bundle decisions about many choices into one (lifestage asset allocation funds or feature bundles for life and annuity policies).

4.  Allow users to express their blessings or joys in an authentic and meaningful way. For example, a comfortable way of expressing thankfullness for a spouse or family member in public.

Adding features and functions that stimulate happiness in users is one way to approach cognitive design.

Metaphors reveal a lot about how we think. Unpacking metaphors means unpacking thought and emotion - an essential task for cognitive designers.

Tangled Spaghetti in My Head: Making use of metaphor is a brief introduction to an important technique – based on asking 12 questions for exploring client metaphors. This technique is used in therapy but it can be easily adapted to design conversations. Try it and let me know how it works.