Cognitive Design

Some of the most powerful cognitive designs work because they trigger powerful neurochemicals that act as natural drugs in our brains and bodies. With the right mix of features and functions a design can produce dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline, Oxytocin and other high-octane sources of mental energy.

An interesting recent example, For Comfort, Mom’s Voice Works Well as Hug, was reported on in the ScienceDaily. Research on young girls under stress showed that they released as much Oxytocin when receiving a hug from their mother as they did a phone call. This has interesting cognitive design implications especially if it holds for other socialization-driven neurotransmitter effects.

Displaying information in new graphical representations to deliver more cognitive impact over traditional approaches is what infographics is all about.  They seem to be popping up everywhere.

The US government is offering $40K in prize money to would-be infographic designers that can take the huge amounts of data about the government and render it more transparently to citizens.  

                                     [click on image for better view] 

Deadline is May 15th and you can enter at Design for America.  You might want to check out this 1-minute video that contrasts infographics to more traditional representations of text and data.  

A very interesting example was recently highlighted in Fast Company, Almost Genius: Plates Double as Nutritional Infographics. Thanks to Heather Daigle for sending the link. The idea is to use an infographic to provide a Nudge to help us make better decisions about eating well. Fast Company is high on infographics and offers an Infographic of the Day.

I am looking for good resources that examine the connection between applied cognitive science and infographics. Thanks.

Getting people to think about something specific has powerful cognitive effects. Focusing attention and loading a specific mental model fills our working memory with content and activates episodic memories. This in turn can impact how we perceive, learn, solve problems, plan, navigate and behave. A single word, image or interaction can cause an avalanche of incidental mental processing. This is one thing that makes cognitive design such a powerful intervention. But it can have unexpected side effects.

A great example was just published in Psychological Science, as You are What You Eat: Fast Food and Inpatients. To quote:

“We found that even an unconscious exposure to fast-food symbols can automatically increase participants’ reading speed when they are under no time pressure and that thinking about fast food increases preferences for time-saving products while there are potentially many other product dimensions to consider. More strikingly, we found that mere exposure to fast-food symbols reduced people’s willingness to save and led them to prefer immediate gain over greater future return, ultimately harming their economic interest.”

This means that merely flashing the logo of the golden arches can cause a booting up of a “fast food” mental model that incidentally but powerfully alters seemingly unrelated reading speed, decision-making and behavior. And this is true for more than fast food….

Dan Heath has an interesting post on Fast Company that talks about how a crazy rumor about Snapple supporting the KKK caught on. Here is the scoop:

 ”But the rumor kept spreading because it had some “evidence” on its side. People would say, “Look at the label—there’s an old wooden slave ship on the front. And on the back there’s a weird K with a circle around it—that’s the sign of the Klan.” And sure enough, if you looked, you’d see a ship and a circled K, and maybe you’d start to wonder. But the reality is less scary: The old wooden ship was a depiction of the Boston Tea Party—get it, Snapple Tea, Boston Tea Party? And what about the K with a circle around it? Well, it doesn’t mean “Klan.” It means “Kosher.” Whoops.”

Strong medicine for the cognitive designer. I’ve seen it work many times. If you can make it easy for people to discover important, interesting or provocative things by themselves, you have produce a powerful cognitive effect.

The cognitive science behind how and why consumers make the decisions they do has received a great deal of attention over the last 10 years.   Best selling book and several new fields such as neuromarketing and behavioral economics have emerged all of which hold important insights for cognitive designers.  If you have not folded these into your toolkit it is well worth the effort. I have found them useful not only to guide design for consumer decision-making but all manner of decision-making involving value.

For a quick introduction to some of the designable insights from behavioral economics, check out, A Marketer’s Guide to Behavioral Economics, written by Ned Welch in the McKinsey Quarterly.  Here are some of the key ideas:

 * Remove the viscerally pain in parting with money.The emotional pain caused by the thought of giving up something we value now, for some benefit in the future, even if it is a big benefit, is something we are not wired to do.  Ways to mitigate the pain of parting with money today include providng the option of delaying payment, categorize the payment in a more pleasant mental account (spare change, tax rebate or anything windfall-related) and use web/mobile phone based ways to make payment instant. 

* Use the power of default options to have the status quo bias work for you. Having employees opt-out rather than opt-in to a 401k plan or offering a base model with several premium features are typical examples. We tend to keep things as they are especially if it takes a lot of mental work to change them. 

* Avoid choice or other cognitive overloading. Too many decisions, too much to learn, too many open issues all mean I won’t decide to buy. 

* Make the choice to buy meaningful by properly positioning the product. If I can quickly and easily see the relative value of the article then buying it makes meaning for me.

In general, you want to be sure that the mental energy generated by making the decision is much greater than the mental work the consumer has to do to make it. Given a reasonable price and some need or want, tipping the balance of mental energy will make the sale every time!

The cognition behind completing other people’s sentences is decisively explored in the article, Predicting Syntax  published in the March Issue of the Journal Language. The article argues our ability to predict what others are going to say comes from knowledge of linguistic probabilities that in turn are developed through day-to-day experience with language. We have knowledge of most probable phrases in a wide variety of contexts and use that knowledge to do many things including completing other peoples sentences.

Discovering the “probable phrases” at work in a given context should provide important insights for guiding all sorts of cognitive design efforts.  A few are mentioned in a press release by the Linguistic Society of America:

“This intrinsic ability to predict based on probability has implications for language comprehension. Educators engaged in foreign language instruction might effectively focus their initial efforts on the most probable sentence constructions. Entrepreneurs engaged in marketing their products or services might use the most probable phrases in preparing their advertising messages. These research findings on linguistic probability may also be helpful in making computerized language more natural. Another practical application would be in the refinement of tools used in profiling and diagnosing those with language disorders. As noted by the authors in an interview, “Linguistic patterns are important in predicting comprehension. If we can make better use of these patterns to enhance comprehension, then we can improve people’s ability to understand one another.” 

Interested to hear from readers that have suggestions for how we can discover probable phrases during the design process.

Your iPhone, Android, Blackberry or other Smart Phone can be a powerful tool for doing design research, prototype testing and other fieldwork in cognitive design.   Besides basic mobile communication, video capture and GPS functionality new apps are creating some intriguing possibilities.

Take for example, Stickybits.  Here is what you do:

1. Download the free app and turn your smart phone into a bar code scanner.

2. Buy some labels – about 30 to 50 cents apiece depending upon how many you buy.

3. Associate digital content (photos, music, documents, videos, URLs, etc.) with your label.

4. Attach the label to some object.

Anytime someone scans the label they see your digital content! Example applications mentioned on the website include: Attaching a video to a birthday card, a resume to a business card and recipes to a cereal box.

A very creative app ripe with implications for designers. I am going to challenge Northwestern students in my Cognitive Design class this summer to use Stickybits in the design process.

I am often asked by clients to help design  presentations, documents or websites to influence decision-making. How do we present information to support the cognitive needs of different types of decision makers? One tool I have had great success with is the five-decision making styles discussed in Change the Way Your Persuade.

The five styles include charismatics, thinkers, skeptics, followers and controllers. I have found these profiles fit experience extremely well. The article if full of useful information for the cognitive designer including characteristics, mental models and prominent examples for each style.  Advice brimming with design implications for how to persuade each style is also given.

Cognitive design is about understanding and meeting the intellectual, affective, motivational and volitional needs of users. One powerful need that designers often fail to consider is the deep-rooted need for equality and fairness.  Just how deep-rooted is this need? Researcher at the California Institute of Technology and Trinity College conducting a brain scanning study found:

“… that the reward centers in the human brain respond more strongly when a poor person receives a financial reward than when a rich person does. The surprising thing? This activity pattern holds true even if the brain being looked at is in the rich person’s head, rather than the poor person’s.”

The implications for cognitive designers are clear – including features that invoke a sense of fairness should increase pleasure and the positive mental energy created through interaction and use.

Exercise bikes integrated with video games have been growing in popularity.  They offer a great platform for cognitive designers looking to shift the exercise experience.   Found a recent article, Predicting the Effects of Interactive Video Bikes on Exercise Adherence that suggests they may help us exercise more consistently by making it enjoyable.

 You have to pay to access the article but the research blog has a good summary post. The research was done using GameBikes an interactive video bike created by a small firm in Texas.

“The bottom-line: the men who trained on the GameBikes were more likely to stick to the exercise regime. They attended an average of 77 per cent of the sessions compared with 42 per cent of participants in the low-tech control condition. “

That 33% difference was attributed to the experience on the GameBike being more pleasant, enjoyable and exciting.  In cognitive design terms that means that exercising with the GameBike produces more mental energy (positive affective and emotions) than just cycling on a stationary bike.