Cognitive Design

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.

Imagine surfing online and running into a banner that reads “click now to contribute $1 to your nest egg. It will more that triple by your retirement age!”.  A buck and a click now for three bucks when I am old, sounds a bit boring. Would I do it?  I asked that to a group of 20 middle-age surfers (45 - 55) and 85% said yes.  They also wanted a widget to track contributions, projected returns and performance relative to others (friends) that are using from this surf-and-save offering.

Once you used surf-and-save for a while the pull to save impulsively will magnify.  For example, the widget would use historical data (online behavior) and your profile to illustrate the financial impact of saving a $1.5 instead of $1.  This could be big money if you spend considerable time online and don’t plan to retire soon. Plus it would likely let you zoom ahead of your friends!

A prototype of surf-and-save does not require a major investment. It would be interesting to find the online contexts and widget behaviors that produced the greatest conversion rates for saving impulsively.

Why can’t  savings be like experience points in social games? Millions of people spend hours a week in online virtual worlds (e.g. World of Warcraft) earning experience points so they can upgrade their avatar, buy virtual goods or enter a new region of the game. Why not use the same mechanism to save real dollars for retirement?

We are already spending a billion real dollars for virtual goods and sponsors are giving virtual dollars to online citizens willing to do simple tasks such as watching videos and completing quizzes. The virtual and real economies are colliding.   Being online means the cost of doing simple financial transactions approaches zero. This means saving a little impulsive many times can be done cost effectively.

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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?

If you have not seen the video, Social Media Revolution 2, check it out. It  is a little over 4 minutes long, has uplifting music, draws on the new book Socialnomics and summarizes the factoids behind the revolution nicely.

Most forms of social media have exploded over the last several years because of the unique mental energy proposition they offer users. Never before have I been able to exert so little mental effort to get so much mental energy (meaning, emotion, ego boost, etc.)  in return. And the effect is even more intense in social games or online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft.

In the July 27th issue of Circulation, the American Heart Association made a 37 page scientific statement on interventions that produce enough activity and dietary changes in adults to lower their cardiovascular risk. One in three people in the US have cardiovascular disease and it is still our leading cause of death.

They looked at the results of 74 individual studies and essentially found that it requires a combination of cognitive strategies to produce lasting health-related behavior change including, counseling, goal setting, extended follow-up and self monitoring. Personalized strategies that use data and context relevant to the individual patient work best.

None of this will be a surprise to cognitive designers but it is good to have the force of a meta-study behind your approach. Plus they looked at the evidence for using specific techniques (e.g. motivational interviewing) and specific platforms (e.g. web. I am still working through the details on specific interventions and will share designable insights in later posts.

Imagine if every step you took during the day was translated via a blue tooth enable pedometer to advancing a virtual school bus in a game you and your friends were hot to win. Would you move more? Would you be more active? the answer appears to be yes, at least that is the finding from the so-called serious game called The Horsepower Challenge. Student activity increased 13% and 62% of the students claimed they exercised more because of the challenge. With 458,404,988 steps logged so far the game has scope.

How else can we use location-based games to shift the health and even financial behaviors of kids and adults?

Managers are constantly seeking ways to tap external knowledge to drive organizational performance.  These include traditional methods such as advisory boards, focus groups, benchmarking and best practices as well as new fangled methods such as crowdsourcing and open innovation.  Of course, the effectiveness of these methods turns on a host of cognitive factors at both the source and destination of the knowledge.  So I am always on the lookout for new ways of leveraging knowledge that pay particular attention to the cognitive design issues involved.

Take for example, McKinsey’s recent article, Using Knowledge Brokering to Improve Business Process.  Content is free but you must register. The article describes a new open innovation method focused not on improving innovation but solving any strategic, operational or financial problem you might have.  The method involves framing your problem in a context free way and enlisting the help of knowledge brokers in several other industries that have solved the problem.  What is of special interest to cognitive designers, other than the method of framing problems in a context free manner,  is the method used to access the knowledge. You do a 1-hour phone call. The knowledge broker starts with a story (10- 15 minutes) and then the team ask questions. To quote:

“ The best medium we’ve found for knowledge brokering is a one-hour telephone call. Visits in person and by video yield less useful knowledge because they subtly distract team members from the experience of listening while subconsciously encouraging them to form irrelevant value judgments based on the speaker’s appearance, expressions, and so on. A knowledge broker should start the conversation by describing experiences related to the process issue, simply by telling the story. Just 10 to 15 minutes is plenty of time to acclimatize the team.”

The knowledge broker is encouraged to challenge the team to adapt the story to their situation. For example:

“A team from a private bank, for example, wanted to steer its high-net-worth clients away from customized investments and toward portfolio-management products offering both higher returns for customers and higher profits for the bank. One of the team’s brokers was a physician who described his bedside manner, explaining that when hospital patients refuse to take their medication he overcomes the problem by engaging directly with the family. This was a breakthrough for the team, which later successfully applied the idea in its own context by developing ways to include the broader families of the bank’s clients in key financial decisions. ”

Very different cognitive interplay from the typical best practices interview or expert opinion session.

In cognitive design we stress understanding how our clients, think, feel, learn, emote, make decisions, perceive the world and conduct other mental business. This is true especially when the client is an infant. I say especially because in no other area has understanding of how the mind works change more radically in recent years than it has with infant cognition.  To get a taste of what I mean check out How Babies Think.

“But in the past three decades scientists have discovered that even the youngest children know more than we would ever have thought possible. Moreover, studies suggest that children learn about the world in much the same way that scientists do—by conducting experiments, analyzing statistics, and forming intuitive theories of the physical, biological and psychological realms.”

You need to register and purchase the entire issue  but if you are designing anything for infants it is well worth the $5.99.

A recent article in Interacting with Computers has some interesting findings on what works when it comes to designing pleasure into our interaction with technology.  Researchers studied 500 examples of pleasurable experiences with interactive technology products (e.g. mobile phone, mp3 player, etc.) and found that stimulation, relatedness (feeling of being connected with other people), competence (feeling of being skilled and knowing what you are doing) and popularity (feeling that you are respected and liked by others and can influence them) were the four dominate factors that determined pleasure during use.  Adding features and functions that help us feel in touch,  skilled and respected are key to creating pleasurable designs.