Cognitive Design

Designing artifacts that change people’s behavior “for the better” is very difficult. Changing unwanted health, savings, safety or customer-related behaviors are among the hardest things we must do. Cognitive designers are always on the look out for new tactics and approaches to help clients avoid failure and achieve success with behavior change programs.

Check out Melinda Fulmer’s article in the LA Times on Parent Seeks Ways to Make Kids Eat Vegetables.  The tactic is to grind them up and sneak them into other foods so kids get them without thinking about it.  Kids get what they need and parents don’t need to do battle with them.

There are even books of recipes (The Sneaky Chef) and special lines of food (Bobokids line from Bobobaby) you can buy to take a “sneak attack” approach to behavior change. The approach seems to work and raises some interesting questions for cognitive designers:

- Is this the best approach to take to the problem? The article discusses ways it can backfire.

- Are there other paternalistic (for the user’s own good) applications of the sneak attack technique?

The concept of mental energy plays a central role in cognitive design. We want to create artifacts that “lift users up” or generate and release more mental energy then they require to use. This means keeping cognitive load low and triggering a cascade of associations, meaning, emotions and other mental processes with a positive valence.

Until recently, there has been very little scientific investigation into the concept of mental energy. The North American Branch of the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) has published a nice over of some of the most important work to date in  Mental Energy: Defining the Science.  Here is a brief summary that I wrote elsewhere:

“The ILSI defines mental energy in terms of three components or as “the ability to perform mental tasks, the intensity of feelings about energy/fatigue, and the motivation to accomplish mental and physical tasks.”   The first component or ability to perform mental tasks or cognition (in the narrow sense) includes attention, memory and speed of processing.  The second component is highly subjective and is based on how energetic we feel. It is transient and makes of the “mood of mental energy”.  The third component is motivation which is a measure of our enthusiasm and determination.”

So mental energy plays a fundamental role in cognitive design. We need to pay special attention to any features or functions that impact its use or production. Indeed, we can model and understand the interactions between a user and an artifact as the conversion of mental energy.   

Every talented employee has a set of cognitive needs (intellectual, affective, motivational, volitional), that can be discovered and documented in a psychographic profile. Just as we segment customers by psychographic profiles we can segment employees and make sure we design benefit programs, policies, work environments, management practices and change programs to meet those needs.

  More strategically, employee psychographic profiles can be used to clarify the intangible aspects of your firm’s employee value proposition and compete more effectively in the war for talent.

  The question is how do we define psychographic profiles for employees?  In my cognitive design class I teach profiling techniques for both customers and employees. To start the discussion for employees we look at an older HBR article that describes the cognitive needs of front-line workers and talks about how meeting those needs is the key to Firing them up! The profiles include:

 You don’t want your video game play to be too hard (frustrating) or too easy (boring) it needs to be “just right” to keep you in the flow.  I can control this by setting a difficulty level – easy, medium, hard, wipe me out – but that produces additional frustrations when I get stuck on a level.  Enter dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) where the game, often using an AI algorithm to analyze my performance, will dynamically make play hard or easier depending on circumstances.  So the cars I am racing against might slow down a bit or the monsters I am fighting might get a bit weaker if I am stuck. Some games even pop up hints or encouragement, or reduce the difficult of play if I keep repeating a level.

For a great overview of which games do this well and which don’t check out the post on DDA on DevBump.   

DDA and videogames socio-psycho dynamics in general are a great source of insights for cognitive designers.  DDA is functionality for the real-time adjustment of cognitive load/fit to avoid certain frames of minds (mental states) in customers.  The question is how can you incorporate DDA into learning, working and service environments? 

For example, one casino has used a variation of DDA to monitor the frustration levels (pain points) of customers, intervening with offers of free meals and shows when frustration with losing gets too high. The idea is to keep them in the game (at the tables) as long as possible.  

   If maximizing the length of customer interactions is essential to your business model and you have both historical data (to build a profile) and real-time data (to infer emotional state) then DDA could be used to support your customer’s cognition (and make money). Also, if you have the data and customers that are leaving during service delivery or otherwise defecting, it might be possible to use DDA to improve retention.    

In my cognitive design class (starting up again at the end of this month at Northwestern), we spend time understanding how sensitive cognition (thought and emotion) is to small changes in environmental influence. A classical example is how subtle hints on how to look at certain pictures will completely change your perception. Look below – if you see faces, look for a vase and visa versa. 

A related and controversial topic is so-called subliminal advertising where consumers are exposed to messages they cannot consciously perceive but none the less impact their wants, desires, thoughts and ultimately actions.  Although scientific studies that support its effectiveness are hard to find, we will be reading a recent article on Subliminal Exposure to National Flags Affects Political and Thought Behavior from researchers at Hebrew University. 

“The results portray a consistent picture: subtle reminders of one’s nationality significantly influence political thought and overt political behavior.”

 Imagine a high-reliability, non-invasive technology that can recognize your thoughts in real time. So, if you are thinking about “celery” or an “elephant” the technology could recognize that and use the information to drive any number of applications.

Exciting progress towards this functionality is reported in a post, Decoding Brain Activity, on the Brain Stimulant blog.  Although very much in the R&D phase, the scope of thoughts that can be recognized and the  reliability levels reported are very impressive.

  Designing products, programs and services that make and sustain behavior change is a top priority in the  US today and a central concern in cognitive design.  Making improvements at work, saving enough for retirement, establishing a healthy life style, effective self-care for those with chronic diseases and even moving to “green practices” are all mega issues with personal behavior change at the core.  

 In recognition of its importance, the NIH roadmap for medical research has initiated a new pilot program on the Science of Behavior Change. They recognize that at “40% of all preventable premature deaths are due to specific patterns of behavior” and that “breakthroughs in the science of behavior change could lead to substantial improvements in public health.” 

The goal is to create an integrated science of behavior change (a daunting task) and ”then support exploratory and interdisciplinary research applying new emerging science to the general problems of the initiation, personalization, and maintenance of behavior change.” 

If productive this work will be a treasure trove for the designer interested in creating new health, savings and organizational change programs base on scientific insights into the cognition of self-regulation (self control) and behavior change.