Cognitive Design

I am looking at an X-box 360 game controller. It does not resemble anything else I use and has 11 buttons and 3 mini joy sticks on it.  It takes two hands to operate. I am looking at the Wii controller. It resembles a remote control and has only 5 buttons and 1 mini joy stick on it.  It takes one hand to operate. Talk about a difference in cognitive load.

The Wii uses similarity and functional simplicity. No wonder it is such a hit.  When you use Wii to play games, you use your body just as you do in real life. This is especially evidence with sports games when you swing your arm holding the controller to hit a tennis ball or roll a bowling ball.  In terms of cognitive fit during learning, the Wii resonantes or even accelerates.  The 360 controller will likely cause mental agitation.

Of course this depends upon the user. A serious gamer that already has a mental model for operating a sophisticated game controller would likely have little problem learning the 360 controller and experience toleration rather than agitation during the learning phase. Once the 360’s advanced functionality has been mastered, the serious gamer likely experiences cognitive acceleration.

The Wii on the other hand has redefined who a gamer can be. People have no fear of picking up something like a remote control and playing simple body-based games. Check out this news story that describes Wii bowling as big hit at a retirement home in  Chicago (average age 77).  Wii seems to be increasing access to the gaming experience for potentially millions of new players.

How far will Wii go? There is now a Wii internet channel where the hope is you will use the controller to browse the web. Google has created a version of its reader for the Wii. One analyst from Merryl Lynch predicts Wii will be in 30% of US households by 2011. So the Wii may not bee a fad driven by a novelty effect or a niche device.

I know comparing Wii and the 360 is like comparing apples and oranges– different type of games, different target market. But what the Wii shows is the power of using design to satisfy unmet cognitive needs. The Wii is simple, resembles something we already understand (metaphor greases the cognitive wheels), makes use of my body (remember cognition is embodied) and lets me get to the fun faster by myself or in a group (emotional energy). All of these factors dramatically lower cognitive load. It trades off graphical quality and game play sophistication and is able to give a lower price. Some people begin to experience cognitive dissonance (holding conflicting beliefs) when they consider paying a lot for a game or game device.

Why is the Wii so popular? It is a masterstroke in cognitive design.

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.  

You no doubt have read Tuft’s position on the cognitive style of PowerPoint.  Now a heavy-weight cognitive scientist offers us four rules for doing better.  “Harvard cognitive scientist Stephen M. Kosslyn, who studies how brains process images, wants to improve the world with his cutting-edge research. And he’s starting with four ways to make your PowerPoint presentations more human brain-compliant”

For more click here.

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.

Cognitive designers envision products and services that enhance the thinking, emotions and other mental states of customers. They do the same for employees. That is, cognitive designers envision HR/employee programs, management policies, processes, workspaces, teams and other “organizational artifacts” that win the hearts, minds and mental states of employees.  

So you can do cognitive design outside the firewall or inside the firewall. A good example of cognitive design inside the firewall (focus on employee cognition for the purposes of organizational improvement) can be found in a recent article on Leading Clever People. The authors Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, two business school professors, point out that clever (smart and creative) people are essential for success in today’s economy but they don’t respond well to the traditional leadership model. So they conducted interviews to find out why.  

“What they learned is that the psychological relationships effective leaders have with their clever people are very different from the ones they have with traditional followers.” 

Furthermore, they found that clever people have specific cognitive needs (or characteristics) that include: 

Bore easily, value intellectual over positional status, understand their worth is based on tacit skills, expect instant access to top management as confirmation of the value of their work, ignore hierarchy, will gravitate to where their work is most appreciated and generously funded.   

To support this type of employee cognition they offer the following design: 

 “The trick is to act like a benevolent guardian: to grant them the respect and recognition they demand, protect them from organizational rules and politics, and give them room to pursue private efforts and even to fail. The payoff will be a flourishing crop of creative minds that will enrich your whole organization.”  

Some would argue that this is catering to an elite but it applies equally well to all type of employees it is just that “the trick” will be different.  In Northwestern’s Master’s Program in Learning and Organization Change, we hit this point hard arguing that one of the main things that makes cognitive design important today is that talented employees demand a workplace that reflects it.   It is up to managers and leaders to understand the cognitive needs of employees and design HR/employee programs and management practices to meet them. Professors Goffee and Jones gave us a great example of how to do that. One that illustrates that understanding the cognitive needs of employees is not rocket science. They did not have to do a brain scanning study or do cognitive task analysis. All they did was look and ask.

 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 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.

   Modern science tells us cognition is pattern-driven, metaphoric, unconscious, biased, mostly emotional and embodied.   A far cry from the symbol manipulating computer seeking to maximize utility and juggling weighted alternatives that the more classical theory of rationality gave us.

This blog  will take the modern characterization of cognition and unpack it to expose the implications for designers.  For example, what does the fact that cognition is “embodied” mean to me as a designer?  How will it help me to design better products, services or organizations?

Just a few days ago the Boston Globe published a news story that brought some attention to the idea of embodied cognition.  The core idea is that we develop, learn and think using our bodies (motion, gestures eye movements). It is not just the brain but also our bodies that are the engines of thinking.  In this way, cognition is “of the body” or embodied.

From a design standpoint, this puts a premium on sensorial, interaction and experiential design approaches but with an important spin – how can we use these techniques to engage the sensorimotor capabilities of the user to support and enhance cognition?

Consider for example how well Apple’s ClickWheel (or scroll wheel) on the iPod connects thumb/finder motion to the cognition of searching large lists and making a selection.  

Engage the senses, engage the body and then engage the brain as a natural progression.  This is what we are hardwired to do.

This means every cognitive designer (no matter what project they are working on) must answer the question:

How do the users think with their bodies?

Not your typical design stance.

 The fact that we think with our senses and bodies and insist on doing so even when we a put in abstract situations (nearly all the metaphors we use are grounded in direct experience), creates some real challenges for design intangible products. Said another way, lack of embodiment is a major reason why the design of intangible artifacts fail.  For example, think about the design of financial products or organizational change programs.  They deal more with abstract concepts, delayed benefits and darn if I can hold one in my hand or even see it. Not very supportive of embodied cognition.

But you can change that through good design. My favorite example comes from the folks at the Institute of the Future and their work on prescient products .  These are products that don’t really exist (that is intangible) but might in the future per the forecasts developed by the institute. So the product here is potential product concept based on a research-based forecast.  Rather than just selling the intangible product as a written report, they mock them up and enhance the embodied cognition of their clients.  Prescient products can now be touched, manipulated, smelled and so on.  Check out the example of  pharmaceutically enhanced fruit

Or another (source Wired Magazine) of the concept of soft drinks that burn calories when we consume them:

 Imagine passing cans of this around to stimulate thinking and discussions on trends in nutrition, weight management and soft drinks. This reflects maximum respect for embodied cognition.

The design priority is to make the abstract concrete in a way that naturally engages the embodied brain.  

Video games and virtual worlds are great at doing this — they give us bodies (or let us create our own) in simulated worlds and where we interact flexibly in real-time in rich and engaging contexts.  A hyper-stimulant for the embodied brain.  Adapting this effect to design non-entertainment applications (training, self development, etc.) is what the “serious game” movement is about.  We will explore serious games and other techniques that promise to inspire superior designs for embodied cognition in future posts.

Cognitive design is about creating artifacts that support and accelerate our thinking and emotions. Check out this new video site Big Think designed to engage you with some of the leading thinkers and deepest questions of our time.

  The big think YouTube style! 

Here is a description from the site:

 ”When you log onto our site, you can access hundreds of hours of direct, unfiltered interviews with today’s leading thinkers, movers and shakers. You can search them by question or by topic, and, best of all, respond in kind. Upload a video in which you take on Senator Ted Kennedy’s views on immigration; post a slideshow of your trip to China that supports David Dollar’s assertion that pollution in China is a major threat; or answer with plain old fashioned text. You can respond to the interviewee, respond to a responder or heck, throw your own question or idea into the ring. ” 

 There was an excellent article yesterday by Shari Roan, a staff writer for the LA Times, Cue the Gluttony, on the role of environmental triggers in Americans’ overeating. 

Part of the argument is that we are hardwired to overeat so when we are in an environment that offers easy access to giant portions, a constant flow of snacks and drinks and specially designed flavors, smells, packaging and displays that say “eat” most of us will get fat.  Cognitive design has played no small role in getting us into this problem. Consumer research pulls on the latest findings in cognitive science to influence our behaviors and choices. It has been especially effective with food.   

Most of the experts quoted in her article call for changing the environment to help elevate the problem, after all as one expert said, “it is easier to change the environment than it is to change people.”  In this way we might be able to design our way out of obesity with the right regulations (e.g. portion size restrictions), package designs (e.g. 100 calorie packs) and environmental designs (e.g. no fast food outlets in High Schools).  

These ideas will in fact lower the mental work I have to do to influence and ultimately control my eating behaviors. Lowering cognitive load is good cognitive design. The concern is that it limits public choice and business freedoms (which we often do for the public good). It also does not really get at the core of the problem. 

The core problem is that many in the US are unable to influence their own behaviors (self-regulate) sufficiently to maintain health, happiness and financial security.  Not just eating but exercise, drinking/drugs, following treatment plans and other health-related behaviors are clearly outside of individual control. Indeed this is a driver the bulk of the cost problem in healthcare. Further, I over spend for a lot of the same reasons I over eat and therefore threaten my financial health.    When you stack all these up the strategy to re-engineer our environment to compensate for failures to self regulate becomes something we want to approach very cautiously. 

A complementing strategy is to use design to support and enhance the ability of consumers to self-regulate (influence their own behaviors) despite the well-engineered temptations that are everywhere in the environment.  I am not talking about designing healthly choice alternatives (although that is essential) but more about using a deep understanding of cognitive science to develop programs that build our self-regulatory strength.  We need to restore our capacity to act as captains of our own ships – that is how we design our way out of obesity and other lifestyle problems. 

The question is what is known about the cognition of self regulation and how can we use it to better influence our choices and behaviors in tough situations?