Cognitive Design

Yes if we can preserve the cognitive factors that make them work.

Mississippi is in trouble when it comes to health and healthcare.   According to the National Institute of Health (NIH) they have the highest rates of obesity, hypertension and teenage pregnancy in the country. Their infant mortality rate is 50% higher than average and 20% of the population has no health insurance.

They have spent millions but report in a recent NIH news story:

“We’ve been attacking this problem over and over again with just heartbreaking results,” said Shirley, chairman of the Jackson Medical Mall Foundation, a one-stop health care facility for Mississippi’s underserved.

Now they are trying to import a health service delivery model, called the Health House from the middle east.  The Health House developed during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war is simple but apparently very effective.  

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I occasionally work with graduate students at Northwestern University to reverse engineer designs that have exceptional impact on cognition or how we think-and-feel. The goal is to discover what unique set of cognitive needs they satisfy and what special features/functions they deploy that move our hearts and minds so effectively.

A student recently sent a link to Questing for Well-Being at Weight Watchers, that reveals some insight into the unique set of cognitive needs the program satisfies:

“We find that among Weight Watchers members in the United States, the support group acts as a venue for angst?alleviating therapeutic confession, fosters the enactment of the support group as a benevolent system of therapeutic oversight, and facilitates a revitalizing practice of autotherapeutic testimonial.”

In short it relieves negative emotions associated with set-backs, makes members comfortable with surrendering some control to the group and promotes wellbeing through helping others.  Weight Watchers is effective at achieving sustained weight loss for its members.  One reason it works is that it attends to cognitive needs that other programs fail to meet.

With the growing wave of aging baby boomers sporting multiple chronic diseases, there are services emerging to help care for them at home.  Intel is on the leading edge with Health Guide.

The success or failure of such services turns on their cognitive design.

Will they improve compliance with treatment plans and promote change in health behaviors in patients? Will they support timely and accurate clinical decision-making and treatment planning?  Clearly, we can have all the gadgets and information in the world and still not produce the outcomes we need.

Check out Elder Care by Remote for a little insight into Health Guide’s effectiveness and an overview of other players in the aging-in-place market.

My hope is that we do not apply the same dated assumptions about patient and clinician cognition that have dominated design in traditional healthcare setting to the emerging opportunities for remote management and care.

Most would agree that good designs are intuitive or easy to understand. But how do you create intuitive designs? In cognitive design we can reformulate that question in more specific terms and appeal to the latest scientific thinking to try and answer it.   More specifically:

What are the cognitive processes associated with intuition and how can we modify our designs (add, refine, and delete features and functions) to support or accelerate those processes?

A new book just published, Foundations for Tracing Intuition, provides a great overview of the cognitive science and modeling techniques needed to answer this question. The author offers a four-process theory of intuition and shows how modeling techniques ranging from talk-aloud protocols to physiological measurements can be used to understand it. This is a must read for the research-oriented cognitive designer. I will be blogging more on the specifics in February.

About 58 teams recently competed in DARPA’s network challenge:

“The DARPA Network Challenge is a competition that will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems. The Network Challenge winner will be the first individual to submit the locations of 10 8-foot balloons moored at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States. The balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads.”

The winning team, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)  used the following  incentive scheme:

“To recruit people into their network of balloon spotters, the MIT team offered to split the prize money, so that if the team won, the person who correctly identified a balloon’s location got $2000. Finder fees were also offered, so that whoever referred a successful spotter would be given $1000; $500 went to the referrer of the referrer, $250 to the referrer of the referrer of the referrer, and so on, with any remainder going to charity.”

An interesting application of classic network marketing incentives to rapidly grow “a crowd” in a 21st century crowdsourcing model.

The ScienceDaily blog reviews yet another new report on the incidental brain/cognitive training impact of playing video games. Racing, Shooting and Zapping your Way to Better Visual Skills, reports:

“According to a new study in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, regular gamers are fast and accurate information processors, not only during game play, but in real-life situations as well.”

 And here is the skinny:

 Playing video games enhances performance on mental rotation skills, visual and spatial memory, and tasks requiring divided attention.

In short,  playing the right type of video games strengthens visual cognition automatically or incidentally. What I would like to see is a study of these incidental brain training effects compared to those with software packages that have been explicitly engineered to improve visual cognition.

Cognitive designer’s delight in such examples because they show us how to create artifacts that naturally make users smarter.   Imagine remaking your product or service so that it naturally makes your customers smarter. In my workshop on cognitive design I show how you can do this with any product or service, even a paper clip.  Redesigning products and services to create a think-and-feel that incidentally build customer’s mental skills is a powerful way to use cognitive design to differentiate your offering.

This month’s issue of Fast Company has a great example of how to use cognitive design to remake something that is essential to corporate performance (ethics-and-compliance training) but mind numbingly boring into something that employees can’t wait to see.   In How to Add Some Fun to Corporate Protocol, the consulting firm BearingPoint has transformed their traditional 3-ring binder training course into a video mini-series modeled after the sitcom The Office.

Using real-life drama in the office and characters that would play out “untounchable  issues” in an exaggerated and humorous form was a big hit.   New episodes are released every Monday and employees can’t wait to watch them. Can you say that about your ethics and compliance training?

One key to success in this approach is hiring an experienced film-maker to direct the work.  This increases the chance of producing real cognitive impact rather than just coming off hokey. Check out an example episode here.

Thank you Help Remedies!

175 slides by Stephen Anderson that show how web designers use psychology to seduce (deliberately entice) users into various interactions. All of the devices revealed (e.g. challenges, points, levels, feedback loops, visual imagery, playing hard to get, ownership bias, social spoofing, etc.) will be familiar to cognitive designers but some of the examples may be new. I especially like his deconstruction of the social music site iLike.

Slide 85 will be of special interests to cognitive designers. He lists a dozen or so  ”Things we know about people” including that they are curious, lazy and want to be in the hero of the story. Although these description may seem mundane, they are actually a very good list of powerful cognitive needs that if met will produce very seductive designs.

The journal article, Age of Reason, is full of interesting data on age-related cognitive decline and performance. The primary focus is on personal financial decision making.  The authors found a “U shaped” relationship between age and the quality of financial decision making involving the cost of credit (e.g. home equity loans and credit cards). Peak performance happens around age 53.

Of special interest to cognitive designers is the section that looks at how various policies can help mitigate sub-optimal decision making.  The article is worth a look by anyone designing to support consumer cognition in the use, purchase or understanding of financial products.