Cognitive Design

There is no doubt that the interactive video game is one of the most successful cognitive designs of all times.  We have a general idea of what makes a good interactive game design tick but don’t understand them well enough to consistently reproduce the effects, especially in areas outside of pure entertainment such as education and health. That is why I am always on the look out for new scientific studies on the video game design pattern.

Take for example, the recent research announced by the Association of Psychological Science, Getting to the Heart of the Appeal of Videogames.   This research studied almost 1000 serious gamers and hundreds of casual gamers. An impressive scope relative to other video game studies.

What they found was that the allure of the game was not the ability to “escape from the world” as is often argued but the ability to try on different characters that you would ideally like to be.

More specifically:

“The research found that giving players the chance to adopt a new identity during the game and acting through that new identity – be it a different gender, hero, villain – made them feel better about themselves and less negative.”

The new identity has the greatest impact when it represents the ideal you but still overlaps with some characteristics you currently have.

This has important implications for cognitive designers. There are many ways to incorporate “trying on the ideal you” in other designs.

On the cognitive design blog we usually talk about ways to create irresistible think-and-feel-experiences, facilitate behavior change, crank up knowledge-intensive performances or deliver mind moving communications.  But there is a darker side.  The lack of doing good cognitive design combined with the tremendous mental stresses of modern life contribute to many problems. These range from wasting mental energy to making poor decisions and failures to self-regulate behavior to more serious and clinical mental health issues.

How much of a design-related issue is mental health and how big is the problem?  To begin to understand the scale of the problem check out Richard McNally’s new book What is Mental Illness? In it he argues that mental illness is an epidemic:

 ”Nearly 50 percent of Americans have been mentally ill at some point in their lives, and more than a quarter have suffered from mental illness in the past twelve months. Madness, it seems, is rampant in America.”

The study behind this claim can be found here and reveals the nature of the problems including anxiety, mood, impulse-control and substance abuse disorders.  

While the foundation for addressing these challenges should rest on evidence-based practice from behavioral medicine, design has an important role to play.  We know this to be true from other healthcare examples. Medicine creates drugs and treatments to cure a wide range of problems but lack of compliance and adherence runs rampant because the way they are delivered is not designed for how the patient’s mind work.   My hypothesis is that the effectiveness of programs designed to maintain and restored mental health are even more sensitive to cognitive factors.

We hardly speak of mental health let alone design broad-scale programs to protect it. Interestingly, this is not the case when it comes to brain health or protecting our selves from age related cognitive decline, dementia, Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.   For example, check out the CDC’s Healthy Brain Initiative.

Given the scale of the problem, there is a wealth of opportunity for cognitive designers interested in creating programs to protect and restore mental health. Prevention is a natural place to start.  As that will no doubt entail behavior change, it might be possible to make small adjustment to ”mental health proof” other behavior change and wellness programs. Now that would be good design.

Learning and teaching are clear cases of activities that very much depend on how our minds work. You would expected cognitive design efforts to reign supreme in education and training. Interestingly, applying the latest thinking in cognitive science and neuroscience to pedagogy and facilitating student and employee learning has not really gotten much traction.  So I am always on the lookout for studies that demonstrate its value.

Take for example, the recent study conducted at the University of British Columbia on the use of interactive teaching methods versus the traditional lecture model in undergraduate physics. They found students that experienced the interactive teaching methods scored twice as high on an exam that tests for understanding of complex physics concepts. In addition, the course using interactive methods had 20% better attendance.

 “There is overwhelming evidence how much teaching pedagogy based on cognitive psychology and education research can improve science education,” says co-author Carl Wieman. “

Interactive methods are simple and well known. They include techniques

“… such as paired and small-group discussions and active learning tasks, which included the use of remote-control “clickers” to provide feedback for in-class questions. Pre-class reading assignments and quizzes were also given to ensure students were prepared to discuss course material upon arrival in class.”

Such techniques are far more congruent with how minds work when learning new material as compared to the sit-and-listen mode in lectures. Clearly this just scratches the surface of what we can do to optimize educational services for how minds really work.

Cognitive designs emphasize features and functions that put us in a particular frame of mind. The goal is to use interaction to create specific perceptions, thoughts, feelings and action propensities in anyone that comes in contact with the design.  In short, strong cognitive designs create a distinctive think-and-feel experience.

One example of a distinctive think-and-feel is illusion or putting us in the frame of mind to believe something about the world that is not true.  For some excellent examples check out the finalists in the 2011 Best Illusions of the Year Contest.  I especially like Silencing Awareness by Background Motion (shown).

Click on the image and go watch the video. Did the dots seem to stop changing color when the object rotated? If so, you experienced an illusion. Watch the video again only this time stare at a single dot. Watch closely as the object rotates and you will see that the dot continues to change color.   Once you see it the illusion will fail to work.

Good cognitive designs pay particular attention (by dedicating features and functions) to psychological moments of truth (PMOT) in the customer experience. Casinos that use real time analytics to know when a high-value gambler is just getting ready to leave the table or a behavior change program that includes a “call your buddy” option when you are nearing relapse are two service designs focused on PMOT. These go far beyond the traditional PMOT of making a good first impression that many designs focus on. Product and service interactions are loaded with PMOT.

Anytime you have a strong emotional reaction (e.g. we often hear I love my phone, I hate my insurance company and performance evaluations are a pain) you are experiencing a PMOT success or failure.  Products or services that directly involve cognition – education, healthcare behavior change, decision support at work – are dominated by PMOT.  These psychological moments of truth are not nice-to-haves or frosting on the service cake, they involve fundamentally important outcomes.

Take for example the need for watchful waiting in healthcare. Patients and clinicians can deal with symptoms that may be best resolved by careful watching versus prescriptions, expensive tests or trips to the emergence room. Yet patients are fearful and clinicians may feel the need to practice defensive medicine.   When the emotional stress hits the decision making process we have a psychological moment of truth.  Combine that with the cost of care being diffused by a third party and a fee for service model that links not waiting with making money and the PMOT becomes even more intense.  We are not dealing with this very well. The result of not adequately supporting the cognition of watchful waiting is a major cost and quality driver in the US healthcare system.

Products and services that make it easy to give money in support of important causes (prosocial spending) make us feel good.  I can give money to fight cancer in children when I make a purchase at the grocery store or send a text to help citizens in Japan cope with one of the biggest natural disasters of all time.

This is good cognitive design- adding specific features and functions to existing products to generate a specific mental state. Prosocial spending engages the psychology of generosity, it makes us happy and gives us well being. But how much lift do we get? How universal is the impulse to be generous?

A recent working paper from Harvard Business School found that the emotional benefits of generosity are significant and universal or occur across cultures. They looked at survey data from a 136 countries and did a causal study in two countries to conclude:

“In contrast to traditional economic thought—which places self-interest as the guiding principle of human motivation—our findings suggest that the reward experienced from helping others may be deeply ingrained in human nature, emerging in diverse cultural and economic contexts.”

This is a strong signal to cognitive designers. Enabling opportunities for prosocial spending – or other forms of generosity-  will generate significant psychological impact for most groups.

Angry Birds is a strong candidate for the most successful game of all time. With nearly 100 million downloads it sees some 1.2 billion of hours of play every year! A masterful cognitive design on the order of lottery tickets.  To understand which features and functions are generating the impact check out the excellent post on the cognitive teardown of the user experience.

I will quote some key findings from the post below but strongly urge you get the game, play it yourself and share insights into why it works.

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In cognitive design we look for ways to put people in specific mental states. Do Nothing For Two Minutes is a seeming simple example that has likely worked over 400,000 times! Give it a try and then make additional suggestions.

How did you do nothing for two minutes?

I did a post earlier introducing MIX the Management Information Exchange, an exciting attempt to use open innovation to reinvent management for the 21st century.  They are running a series of prizes, called M-prizes, to help focus the creativity of the crowd.  

I submitted an entry, To Engage and Impassion Employees we Must Learn to Manage Mental Energy, to the M-Prize for Human Capital Management.  Here is the summary:

“A key to unleashing human capability in the workplace is to develop a management discipline geared toward creating intangible as well as economic value by meeting the psychological needs of key stakeholders.  Such a management discipline must be based on a modern scientific understanding of how minds work and will need to provide frameworks for estimating, measuring, creating and optimizing mental energy.”  

Check it out and leave comments.  There are currently 65 other entries that are worth a peak. I will summarize the results from a cognitive design perspective and do additional posts.

Cigarettes have been characterized as a nicotine delivery system. There are over a billion people that smoke them worldwide.  It is increasing. The World Bank Group estimates that between 80,000 – 100,000 young people take up smoking cigarettes per day. According to the American Heart Association about 49 million adults in the US smoke them.

A new type of cigarette, called the electronic cigarette, e-cigarette or just the e-cig, has hit the market. It is smokeless. Instead of burning tobacco you use a battery to vaporize and inhale a nicotine solution.   It is unregulated. It can in theory be consumed where smoking is banned.

These new electronic nicotine delivery systems are just now being studied. I found some research on EurekAlert! that is sounding an alarm:

To address this question, researchers at the University of California, Riverside evaluated five e-cigarette brands and found design flaws, lack of adequate labeling, and several concerns about quality control and health issues. They conclude that e-cigarettes are potentially harmful and urge regulators to consider removing e-cigarettes from the market until their safety is adequately evaluated.”

There are more than five brands on the market. Although I could not find a formal market study, there are newspaper articles that claim the market is growing fast. Ironically, the high price of traditional cigarettes have made the e-cig technology affordable.

According to Smoke Power here is how they work:

 ”… the user inhales on the electronic cigarette, this causes an air flow sensor to signal to the inbuilt microprocessor, that in turn activates the atomizer. The atomizer converts the liquid nicotine in the cartridge into a vapour (by atomization), which is digested by the user. Simultaneously, a vapor is released from the glycol by the atomizer to resemble ‘smoke’. “

They include tobacco flavoring, look like a cigarette and produce vapor like smoke so they are trying to meet the cognitive needs of smokers with the design.

Interested to hear from readers that have used e-cigs or that have strong opinions about them.

Source of Image: Electronic Cigarette Comparison