Cognitive 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.

Let’s hope.

Low cost, wearable, reliable and real-time brain machine interfaces will trigger a revolution in cognitive design.  We will be able to remake products that directly interact with the brain and fundamentally change how we learn and develop by externalizing and manipulating hidden mental states. And other very exciting stuff.

How close are we? Check out the Emotiv Systems demo at the IBM partner booth at the recent Consumer Electronics Show. Emotiv’s Chief Product Officer says they will be released in 2008.

 If you want to see something a bit cooler, check out this earlier video on playing video games with your mind.

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.

 According to leaders in behavioral finance (scientific study of how cognitive biases shape our economic decision making) the answer is NOT that we don’t make enough money.  Instead, the reason we fail to save is that we are not cognitively wired to do it. I have a number of biases that block savings behaviors including:

1. an aversion to risking or giving up current gains (so I don’t want to commit  any of my current income to a regular savings program)
2. a strong belief that I will save more tomorrow (so that I don’t need to save today) and other faulty mental models
3. underestimating the value of a resource in the future (I cannot wrap my brain around the time value of money so I am not swayed by the logic of saving soon and often)
4. a strong visceral factor that drives me to maximize consumption in the present (it is hard to delay gratification)
5. an aversion to thinking about being old and eventually dying.  

These are very powerful (often overwhelming) effects that lead to poor decisions and inaction. And it gets worse- the design of the products makes it very hard (intellectually and emotionally) to consume them:

· The products are complex so I have to do a lot of mental work to understand and use them (very high cognitive load) this decrease the relative motivation to participate, triggers a mental state of procrastination and leads to inaction

·  small print and legal jargon can invoke feelings of doubt.

In short, retirement products and services don’t fit the way we think and feel so we tend not to consume them appropriately despite the fact that it is in our best interest to do so. 

Actually, they score 1 out of 5  (at the very bottom) in terms of cognitive fit and literally agitate cognition rather that support or enhance it. The design of retirement and saving products and services is an area of big opportunity for cognitive designers.  And there has been a lot of action: Pension plans that literally let you save more tomorrow by allocating a portion of future earnings (you avoid having to part with anything today and it plays off of the fact that you undervalue future resources), credit cards that allow you to spend and save for retirement at the same time, pension plans that automatically enroll employees and require them to opt out if they don’t want to participate (having the status quo bias work in our favor), 401k plans that come with services that pick specific funds for you to invest in (lower cognitive load) and so on.  We will cover all these products and the research that drives them in this blog.

You might complain that you don’t design financial products or services so what can you learn from this? Look at the list of biases again.  They (or very close variants of them) are involved in the customer or employee cognition around almost every type of product or service that involves behavior change. So if you are in the behavior change business the lessons learned should be useful to you. 

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.

The May/June 07 edition of Technology Review was focused on design. The lead article introduces the idea of a beautiful machine as something that is minimally complicated. You may need to set up a free account to get access.

Watch the video and listen to the editor’s description of his new Apple computer. Wow has Apple mastered the ability to create specific mental states in users (one of the goals of cognitive design).   Just in case you don’t get to the video here is some of the narrative:

“I love my MacBook Pro because its broad but slim body seems luxuriously solid yet also gracefully light. I love how the resistance subtly increases when I press a key, flattering my touch. I love the crisp definition of the graphics on its large, luminous screen. Most of all, I love how all my Macintosh software shares an elegant iconography and navigation scheme, and how all my Apple hardware works together uncomplainingly.” 

The concept of minimally complicated is an intertesting design principle.  Another  quote from the editor:

“That is, they should have no more functions than is reasonable given their form; every function should be no more complicated than it needs to be; and the way each function works should be intuitively easy to understand. As Albert Einstein may have said, “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.” ”

This advice is especially relevant as we try and repackage existing functionality into new forms as is the case with many mobile devices.  For example, email as something engineered for a desktop PC, needs to be de-functioned a bit to fit the form of a handheld. So I still have the complicated functionality of email but it has been minimized to fit the new form.  Presto minimal complication.

Of course there is the aesthetics of this too…..

Lottery tickets are one of the best examples of cognitive design that we have.  After all, they have transformed something consumers hate to do (pay taxes) into a multi-billion dollar form of entertainment.  The design features and why they work  (leverage cognitive biases, low cognitive load, high visceral impact, etc.) will be covered extensively in this blog. 

For many buying a lottery ticket is an easy thing to do. It gives a sense of hope and momentary excitement that is sometimes shared with friends.  These are powerful mental states – hope, excitement and connection all for a dollar or two!  If that is what consumers really want when they buy a lottery ticket then they pay off every time.

The information design of financial products and services is very sensitive to the cognitive biases of consumers. A great example of this is the payment/interest rate bias.   Because of this bias most of us will tend to underestimate the interest rate on a loan when we are given information about the monthly payment and duration – or the stream of payments we have to make to repay the loan.

So in practice, we tend to take higher interest rate loans if we are only (or mostly) shown information on monthly payments and duration.   A  study  by two business professors from Dartmouth show just how far this effect can go:

 ”Firms provide frames that cater to bias, and biased consumers sort into different contracts than unbiased consumers. This leads to segmentation across firms in how they present information to consumers, which customers they attract, and equilibrium prices”.

 The market segments by cognitive bias!

 This effect was found, according to to study, in non-banking lending practices only.