Cognitive Design

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. 

Systematic bias in perception, memory, interpretation and reasoning is a key aspect of cognition. These biases are used to explain seemingly irrational behavior (e.g. buying a lottery ticket), improve decision making (e.g. training against the “beautiful works well” bias in hiring), the design of financial products (I will save more tomorrow) engineering safety procedures,  crafting magic tricks, developing advertising messages and a host of other applications.

Designing to enhance and support cognition (or cognitive design) means understanding and managing (i.e. overcoming or paternalistically leveraging)  the cognitive biases at work in your design.   To get an idea of the cognitive biases that may be impacting the effectiveness of your design check out the great list on Wikipedia.   

Metaphors reveal a lot about how we think. Unpacking metaphors means unpacking thought and emotion - an essential task for cognitive designers.

Tangled Spaghetti in My Head: Making use of metaphor is a brief introduction to an important technique – based on asking 12 questions for exploring client metaphors. This technique is used in therapy but it can be easily adapted to design conversations. Try it and let me know how it works. 

Finding unmet cognitive needs (especially ones rooted in emotions and other visceral factors) is a wellspring for product and service innovation. Discovering these needs can be tricky. Listening for metaphors (or doing a metaphor hunt) has always been a good technique.

 Dan Saffer writes a to-the-point Masters thesis (Carnegie Mellon School of Design) on the role of metaphor in interaction design. Clearly illustrates how metaphors lower the cognitive load of an artifact by translating abstract concepts into something more familiar and visceral for users. He warns:

“Unquestionably, companies have fostered onto users all sorts of misbegotten metaphors, stuffing existing functionality into uncomfortable and awkward metaphors. Yet, when used properly, they can be a powerful tool for conceptualizing, orienting, and personifying products.”

If you don’t want to read the entire thesis check out Dan’s work on slide share.

This report outlines the major technologies, trends and opportunities in US, Europe and Asia.

Lots of R&D globally, some commercialization and a smattering of start-ups.   

Here is the link