Cognitive Design

The technology and market research company, Forrester, has chimed in on the important issue of how to apply emotional design to differentiate your web site. The report is a bit pricey at $499 but you can find a post on the CMS wire that covers the key concepts and techniques here.  What I like is that they put cognition or more specifically, emotional needs, center stage.  They advocate ethnographic analysis and the importance of non-verbal signals (e.g. facial expressions) for uncovering hidden needs. Music to the ears of the cognitive designer.

Although it contains no new insights or techniques for readers of this blog, the report makes for a nice reference when you are trying to make the case for cognitive design.

I am often asked by clients and students, what can cognitive design do to help us with stereotypes? For example, consider the belief (and supporting mental models) that female drivers are way worse than male drivers.  Further, how can we differentiate harmful stereotypes from useful generalizations?

The first step, as is always the case in cognitive design, is to make sure we understand what cognitive psychology and neuroscience have to say on the matter.  Cognitive design starts with the best scientific model of the “workflow between the ears” that we can muster. Fortunately, there has been a lot of work on stereotypes lately. Take for instance the link that Gina Farag shared recently on Biases the Blind: The role of stereotypes in decision-making processes.  It is a treasure chest full of designable insights, including:

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Artifacts that work by creating and sustaining hope in people represent some of the most powerful cognitive designs on the planet. Consider for example the holy cross and the lottery ticket.  Examples of hope-generating designs span a tremendous range precisely because there are many flavors of hope. To see this check out the post on PsyCentral on The 7 Kinds of Hope. The kinds include inborn, chosen, borrowed, bargainer’s, unrealistic, false and mature.  

First step in the cognitive design of a hope-generating artifact? Pick your flavor.

Imagine a business that is conceived, designed, built and launched in 24-hours.  And then gets 67 bids and is sold a week later on e-bay for $5100.

Lots of interesting cognition here. For example, consider the cognitive processes of the instant-entrepreneurs and the cognitive impact of their 24-hour-business:

“There was a large brainstorming with everyone involved to start with and then we split into pairs,” said Mr Mosley. “We all had a think about what we liked and then the pairs had three minutes to pitch their ideas.”

Most were quickly discarded because they could not be built in time. A vote selected the winner. ‘Shop by colour’ came top, narrowly beating DeathVolt, a depository for internet usernames and passwords that are then passed onto next if kin when the customer dies and a concept called ‘Lists’ that simply let people compile and share the favourite ‘top tens’ of anything in a collaborative manner.

“If you are really under time pressure you are better off taking a decision quickly,” said Mr Mosley. “We were already an hour behind schedule and any more we would not have been able to create anything.”

After pizza, they knuckled down to the hard work. The programmers redesigned open source software that recognised colour in pictures to work for an online retail shop and the sales team called in a favour from affiliate feed specialist TradeDoubler.com to list clothing ranges from retailers Wallis and Dorothy Perkins – a process that would normally take weeks. “What impressed me was that the marketing people that came up with the DrHue logo were the same people who did not originally like the idea,” said Mr Mosley.

For more info on the experience and a video go here. This takes the idea of rapid prototyping to an entirely new level.

The Mood Swingers offers customized promotional magnetic strips that you can hang on a refrigerator or other metal surfaces to associate emotional states with your designs.  A flexible, low cost material for cognitive designers?

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Controlling (or more broadly regulating) our own behaviors in the face of powerful thoughts, emotions, memories and cravings is one of the central challenges in modern society. It is also one of the reasons for bothering with cognitive design. Designing to enable self-control is a foundational challenge for cognitive designers.

That is why I am always on the lookout for new scientific studies with designable insights into cognition and neurology of self control/regulation.   Just found a new brain scanning study on cocaine users from the Brookhaven National Lab that may settle a long standing issue. The study found that cocaine user’s can control cravings for the drug even after they have been exposed to cues that trigger the craving.  This is an important finding because often it is assumed that once exposed to a cue or trigger our capacity for self control approaches zero. As the researchers state:

“Many current drug treatment programs help addicted individuals predict when and where they might be exposed to drug cues so that they can avoid such situations,” Volkow said. “While this is a very useful strategy, in real-word situations, cues may come up in unexpected ways. Our findings suggest that a clinical strategy that trains cocaine abusers to exert greater cognitive control could help them selectively inhibit the craving response whenever and wherever drug cues are encountered — whether expectedly or unexpectedly.”

So there is scientific evidence to encourage the design of post-cue self control strategies even when faced with something as powerful as the craving for cocaine.

If you are faced with designing products, services, communications, events or other artifacts for those that are grieving it especially important to take a cognitive approach.  Your goal may be to help them make sense of a loss, find hope in the future or otherwise cope but the key is to understand the cognition of the grieving process.  Susan Berger has a new book that goes beyond the typical treatment (3-stages of grieving) and introduces types of grievers including the Nomad, Memorialist, Normalizer, Activist and the Seeker.  Each type has a specific set of cognitive needs or psychographic profile.  You can get more information from an interview she did for PsyCentral or check out her book, The Five Ways We Grieve.

I have yet to apply her theory to a design problem but will have a chance to shortly. I will blog what I find.

Philip’s and ABM AMRO collaborated to create a unique way of displaying emotions in your home. The Rationalizer consists of a bracelet (EmoBracelet) that measures galvanic skin response (arousal level) and lights up a display on the bracelet as well as one on the surface of a bowl called the EmoBowl.

The number and color of graphical elements changes as your arousal levels increases or decreases. The initial application was designed for making online investment decisions at home. From a cognitive design standpoint, many other uses for this emotion sensing technology are possible.

The EmoBracelet+Bowl are meant as prototype concepts (versus commercial products) so the companies can learn more about the domain of sensing emotions.

Check out a high resolution imagine of the bowl and bracelet here.

Movies and short films are designed experiences. As such they should be fertile ground for the cognitive designer.  A recent PhD thesis by Gregory Hale explores A Cognitive Schematic Analysis of Films.  As far as a I can tell it is a unique contribution using schema theory from cognitive science to research and provide design insights into short-film experiences.The study reveals some 23 design implications for how film makers can have greater impact via surprise, conflict resolution, interest, causality, intensification, rapid orientation and other effects using schema.  

In addition, the thesis provides some reusable methods (Schematic Analysis Design Method) that might be useful in other domains. I don’t plan on digging any deeper into this but would love to hear from any readers that do.

I am amazed at how many projects aimed at trying to create and sustain behavior change end up including a website as a least part of their design.  If your behavior change program includes a website you need to check out this article, that focuses on the information architecture of behavior change websites.

The authors look at various information architecture or website designs (matrix, hierarchical, tunnel and hybrid) and explain how they influence certain types of user behaviors. The article does not go on to link the feature-behavior discussion into the psychology of self-regulation but that is what we cognitive designers can do!