Cognitive Design

Services, unlike most products, are hard for customers and employees to see, touch and explain. Services are a set of activities that we can experience but they are fleeting and don’t seem to have the clearly defined and mostly static features and functions that products do. It is hard to give a demo of a service.  Further, customer don’t own services like they do products.

It is little wonder that it is challenging to explain and sell complex services.  Doing so requires solid cognitive design both of the service itself (to eliminate unneeded complexity and reward necessary complexity with a boost of mental energy) and the design of the communications about the service.

An excellent resource for tips on how to design effective communications about complex services is Joshua Porter’s book, Designing for the Social Web.  One example he presents is an explanation of Netflix’s service:

 You might complain that this is not a good example because the Netflix service is not complex. But of course that it exactly the point. It is not complex because they made it so darn easy to understand.

Although focused on the web the examples and principles can be applied to all services.  Also check out Mr. Porter’s blog.

Cognitive biases erupt when we take the reasoning processes, rules and tricks that work so well  in one domain and apply them to another where they don’t fair so well.   An interesting example is described by Robert Britt in his LiveScience article Monsters, Ghosts and Gods: Why We Believe.

A key point from the article: 

“Brian Cronk, a professor of psychology at Missouri Western State University. “The human brain is always trying to determine why things happen, and when the reason is not clear, we tend to make up some pretty bizarre explanations.”

 Although not called out as a bias, it clearly is.  Monsters are a byproduct of our cognitive need to make sense of the world.