Cognitive Design

In cognitive design we seek to support, enhance or even create specific mental states (frame of mind) in anyone that uses our designs.   Understanding the neuropsychology of mental states is therefore fundamental to the discipline. Two recent studies shed interesting new light on the link between money, reputation, fairness and food cravings. Quotes and links are given below.

Fairness and sweets (from the SciGuy blog) 

“According to the researchers, who were from UCLA, receiving a fair offer activated the same brain circuitry as when we eat the food we crave, win money or see a beautiful face. Unfair offers engendered disgust.”

 Money and repuation (from the mind & brain blog)

  “Our findings indicate that the social reward of a good reputation in the eyes of others is processed in an anatomically and functionally similar manner to monetary rewards, and these results represent an essential step toward a complete neural understanding of human social behaviors,” concluded Sadato and colleagues.

In cognitive design the classic distinction between thought and action is thrown out the window.   The idea of separating thinking from doing (something we still do as designers and managers) is dangerously dated.  Thought and action are intertwined in the matrix of experience. This is why in cognitive design we include requirements for achieving a specific frame of mind in the user (mentality) as part of the functional specifications of the artifact – thought, emotion and action as an integrated whole.

Some support for the idea that thought and action might not be as different as we assume was recently demonstrated in a musical performance in New York City.   As reported by the New Scientist, (registration is required) performers played their music by thinking about doing it.

“It demonstrated Sulzer’s idea that thinking about an action could stimulate the brain in much the same way as actually carrying it out.”

So our brains themselves might not make much of a distinction between thinking a thing and doing a thing.  

   How do I design a concept, message or product that rapidly spreads by word-of-mouth “like a virus”?  Idea viruses, viral videos, viral marketing and even viral business models are a central topic in cognitive design.  A lot of ink has been spilled on seeding with influencers, the necessity of remarkable content, making sharing easy and rewarding and always asking permission.  

All of this pales though when you have a good product, it’s free and sharing is required to activate its core functionality.

This is part of the message that Gina Bianchini delivers about her company Ning, in the May cover story of Fast Company.  

Ning helps you to create a social network around any topic you like for free. How cool is that? Clearly, if I am going to make my social network go, I must invite (or share it with) others who in turn can set up their own and invite (or share it with) others and so on. This is a great example of a product that has a built in viral feature – must share it to get value out of it. 

Unlike most other social networks Ning has a built in revenue model – Google ads. Or if I want to avoid the ads I can pay a small monthly fee. How smart is that? 

  From a cognitive design perspective, the success of Ning, leaves us with a pressing question: How can we create share-dependent versions of traditional products and services to get viral effects?

   In cognitive design we want artifacts that are tuned to support, enhance or even create a particular frame of mind (thoughts + emotions).  One push back I get on this is everybody thinks and feels differently so how can you design for more than one person? This is where the cognitive science comes in – there is a lot of common ground in the way we think and feel and that can be used to build up psychographic profiles that segment a market or define target groups.  Psychographic profiles define groups of people that are operating on a shared mental model, cognitive bias, metaphor, decision heuristic, learning style, emotional trigger or other combination cognitive psychological characteristics that have enough discriminating power to generate meaningful classification.  The work of cognitive design is to link the psychographic profile to behaviors and ultimately to product features and functions.  

  There are not well developed out-of-the-box psychographic profiles.  Investing in developing accurate psychographic profiles for your markets is well worth the effort because it provides the insights needed to drive waves of innovation and possibly competitive advantage.

  Take mental models for example. Mental models (long the focus of cognitive scientists) define how we think and feel about a particular thing/event/agent in the world. So I have a mental model about families, trees, cars, mountains, bosses and the like. Mental models are grounded in my experience and values. They include attitudes which can generate emotions. For example, my mental model of snakes includes attitudes that invoke the emotion of fear.  Understanding a group in terms of the mental models they share – especially as they relate to products and services, can be a powerful foundation for psychographics. So the question becomes, how do we discover shared mental models?

  Most techniques start by eliciting the individuals’ mental model and then aggregating those using a technique for measuring similarity to define the common or shared mental model.  The end result is a “concept map” that defines the thought/feelings that make up the model and how they related to each other. Some example techniques:

1. The ACSMM method that measures similarity based on the number of nodes and links that the individual mental models have in common  

2. The ZMET technique that uses images and metaphors to elicit individual and discover shared mental models

3. Pathfinder networks that use a statistical analysis of pair-wise comparisons by individuals to establish a graphic theoretic measure of similarity to discover the shared model  

  For a brief comparative overview of many of the major techniques see the study by Johnson and others.  For the most part, these are research-based techniques and represent the “big gun” in psychographics.  They are not commonly used by marketing and product development groups. My bet is that they (or more streamlined versions of them) will be.   Just as you drive business decisions based on demographics today, you will drive business decision based on psychographics in the future.

 Designing to change behavior is the toughest challenge in cognitive design. This is especially true when it comes to designing products, services and communications to change health-related behavior including following the doctor’s advice to manage diabetes and other chronic conditions.

 A new article in the LA Times,  A Health Message Listeners can Relate To,   describes the effectiveness of using soap-opera themed stories to achieve changes in health-related behaviors.

Stories convey important learning without having to work at it (low cognitive load). They are fun to repeat.  Soap operas are the best structure to use for many health applications  because they engage us in social learning or learning by observing (or hearing about) other people’s behavior. We are automatically programmed (or hardwired) to do this. This is why we ask leaders to be an example (model behaviors for employees) and your mom worries about who you hang out with (vicarious learning from your peer group).  Further, soap operas by design “super size” (without lapsing into a parody) human drama giving them hard, deep and potential lasting emotion impact.

Because they have low cognitive load, invoke the powerful force of social learning and have over-sized emotional and psychological content they can be powerful devices for changing behavior.

Traditionally, how a customer thinks and feels about a product is the domain of advertising, marketing and branding.   But now, in cognitive design, we have made the customer’s frame of mind (set of mental states) part of what is being designed.  Design now includes functionality, usability and mentality (frame of mind).  Of course customers are always free to “make up their own minds” but cognitive design seeks to create artifacts that are optimized to support and enhance a particular frame of mind that she chooses to be in. Simple example – when going to the movies do I want to laugh (see a comedy) be scared (see a horror flick) or think deeply (see a drama).  Designing for cognition has a long tradition in art, entertainment and luxury products.  What is new?  

We now have untapped science-based insights into how minds work that will radically extend the scope and effectiveness of cognitive design (promise and peril). 

   Designing to achieve specific mental states in all artifacts means we are blurring the lines between advertising, marketing and product/service development as never before. For example, the EEG systems used to measure thoughts and feelings  that I’ve mentioned in this blog before can be used not only to assess the effectiveness of ads but also to test design concepts long before and product is built.  There are many implications to the merging of marketing and product development through cognitive design.

   One immediate opportunity is to look at the tools marketers have used to win mindshare and see how they can be adapted to design. Not surprising, marketers have been on the forefront of applied cognitive psychology. Recent innovations include metaphor and archetypes in marketing, cognitive bias in consumer decision making, viral marketing (applying the concept of ideas virus and memetics), customer mental models, emotional intelligence in selling and of course neuromarketing or the use of fMRI and EEG machines (clinical equipment) to “read out” a customers thoughts and emotions (among other things).   Thanks to human factor specialists, designers can tune functionality to improve usability. Perhaps the cognitive design specialist, adapting lessons from marketing, can now assist product developers with tuning functionality to improve mentality (a set of mental states). Said another way, the breakthrough that cognitive design promises may be rooted in giving the marketer more direct access and influence over product/service functionality.

Even better would be to bring the engineers, product developers, human factor specialists, designers and marketers together in common design framework and methodology that takes a holistic and human-centric approach to achieving functionality, usability and mentality.

Is the Ad a Success? The Brain Waves Tell All is another recent article in the New York Times highlighting the role of EEG measurement techniques in neuromarketing.

“Instead of hypotheses about what people think and feel, you actually see what they think and feel”

Of course, there is nothing stopping us from using this technology in the design phase of product development rather than to test the effectiveness of potential ads.   

The article mentions a firm, NeuroFocus, we have not discussed in this blog before and points out there are many presentations at the upcoming 54th annual convention of the Advertising Research Foundation that cover the use of neuroscience to drive the effectiveness of ads.