Cognitive Design

A growing number of studies reveal an important new class of self-regulation failure called vicarious goal fulfillment. Interestingly, those that rate high in measures of self-control are especially susceptible.  Most importantly for cognitive designers,  this effect can be triggered when we are trying to design solutions for helping people improve self control!

A recent blog post on Futurity, describes the effect as it relates to food choices:

“It’s an effect called “vicarious goal fulfillment,” in which a person can feel a goal has been met if they have taken some small action, like considering the salad without ordering it, says Gavan Fitzsimons, professor of marketing and psychology at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, who led the research.”

This means offering a health food choice on a menu as a way to improve eating habits can actually backfire and may do so more often for people with high self control. Here is the explanation:

“In this case, the presence of a salad on the menu has a liberating effect on people who value healthy choices,” Fitzsimons says. “We find that simply seeing, and perhaps briefly considering, the healthy option fulfills their need to make healthy choices, freeing the person to give in to temptation and make an unhealthy choice. In fact, when this happens people become so detached from their health-related goals, they go to extremes and choose the least healthy item on the menu.”

This is a great example of why it is critical to understand the actual cognitive needs of the people we are designing for.

I am often asked by clients to help design  presentations, documents or websites to influence decision-making. How do we present information to support the cognitive needs of different types of decision makers? One tool I have had great success with is the five-decision making styles discussed in Change the Way Your Persuade.

The five styles include charismatics, thinkers, skeptics, followers and controllers. I have found these profiles fit experience extremely well. The article if full of useful information for the cognitive designer including characteristics, mental models and prominent examples for each style.  Advice brimming with design implications for how to persuade each style is also given.

Last year I gave a 2-hour workshop at the annual Design Research Conference (DRC) hosted by the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology.  It was a great event. A combination of 20-minute TED-like talks, 5-minute speed talks, longer keynotes and workshops delivered by folks with great experience working on the cutting-edge.  My workshop explained how to model user interactions as the conversion of mental energy.

DRC 2010 is scheduled for May 10-12 and will be held in Chicago.   Strongly recommended it for cognitive designers. Of special note is Don Norman’s opening remarks. He has generated a lot of buzz recently by taking the position (which I strongly agree with):  

“design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs”  

How does our ability to remember, think, plan, decide, learn and manage emotions change with age? What methods (exercise, diet, cognitive training, social interaction, stress management) can be used to help minimize cognitive decline?  How do we distinguish normal cognitive aging from a cognitive disease? Pressing questions as Baby Boomers begin to hit 65 in mass.

These questions are being taken up by a new public-private Research Partnership on Cognitive Aging.  Some $28M is already flowing into 17 research projects.

“These grants will make it possible for researchers to further pursue basic research in this area and to devise interventions that could be experimentally tested for their ability to improve cognitive function in older people,” 

The research is basic and still in the formative stages but it should be a great source of insights for cognitive designer. I will watch the progress of the 17 projects and share designable insights as they surface.

In the meantime, if you have insights into how to design for the aging mind please leave a comment and share your experiences with other readers.

Many studies have shown that we may tend toward lying, cheating or other unethical behaviors if we believe our identities are hidden. Being anonymous can have a big impact on behavior. A new study, Good Lamps are the Best Police, show that darkness encourages self-interested or unethical behavior even when it does not hide our identity. You can find a PDF version of the study in draft form (for free) here.

The researchers suggest that the perception of darkness creates the illusion of anonymity in our minds even when we consciously know are identity will be known.

“Departing from this body of work, we suggest that darkness does more than simply produce conditions of actual anonymity. We contend that darkness may create a sense of illusory anonymity that disinhibits self-interested and unethical behaviors. Individuals in a room with slightly dimmed lighting or people who have donned a pair of sunglasses may feel anonymous not because the associated darkness significantly reduces others’ ability to see or identify them, but because they are anchored on their own phenomenological experience of darkness. When individuals in such circumstances experience darkness and, consequently, impaired vision, they generalize that experience to others, expecting that others will conversely have difficulty perceiving or seeing them.” 

Clear implications for the cognitive designer interesting in leveraging the effects of lighting and other devices that can create a false sense of anonymity.

The PEW Research Center just released a major study on how Americans consume news. The findings show that the cognition involved definitely involves  opportunistic information foragaging across multiple sources.

“Some 46% of Americans say they get news from four to six media platforms on a typical day. Just 7% get their news from a single media platform on a typical day.” 

Also of interest to cognitive designers is the finding that consumer do participate in the creation of the news but typically fall far short of citizen journalism. They create content by comments and reposting.

 ”37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.”

The report is loaded with findings on the psychographics of newsies.  See for example, top reasons people follow the news.  If you read the report and find other results relevant to cognitive design, please post a comment.

Cognitive design is about understanding and meeting the intellectual, affective, motivational and volitional needs of users. One powerful need that designers often fail to consider is the deep-rooted need for equality and fairness.  Just how deep-rooted is this need? Researcher at the California Institute of Technology and Trinity College conducting a brain scanning study found:

“… that the reward centers in the human brain respond more strongly when a poor person receives a financial reward than when a rich person does. The surprising thing? This activity pattern holds true even if the brain being looked at is in the rich person’s head, rather than the poor person’s.”

The implications for cognitive designers are clear – including features that invoke a sense of fairness should increase pleasure and the positive mental energy created through interaction and use.

An interesting (and free) article, Directed Attention as a Common Resource for Executive Function and Self-Regulation was just published in Perspectives on Psychological Science. The author’s argue that our ability to consciously control our attention is key capacity for both the executive function (planning, thinking) and self-regulation (control of thoughts and behavior). Further consciously controlled or directed attention is a limited resources that is quickly depleted. It can be restored by sleep, meditation or the use of involuntary attention instead of directed attention.

Of special interest to cognitive designer is the claim that nature-based activities (e.g. walking in the woods and gardening) have strong restorative effects on attention and therefore the ability to self-regulate, plan and use other higher cognitive functions. In the authors words:

“What is particularly remarkable about this study is the effect of a very modest intervention (an activity of at least 20 min carried out three times per week) on a problem that, according to the literature in this area, has the capacity to undermine people’s lives for a matter of years (Blesch et al., 1991; Winningham et al., 1994).

Clear implications for those designing programs to help with chronic disease management or other high self-regulation challenges.

In cognitive design we focus on creating a specific think-and-feel for artifacts.   Every interaction with a product or service generates thoughts and feelings and collectively those makeup experience.   Designing a specific experience especially one that differentiates a product or service is still very much an emerging practice but something executives want.  Or so argues Bruce Tempkin in a recent post, The State of Customer Experience 2010.

Bruce is a thought-leader for Forrester Research and I have blogged on several of his reports in the past.   His state of the customer experience research is based on interviews with 141 executives. Findings include: 90% see customer experience as an important strategy for 2010 but only 11% have a disciplined approach in place. More importantly for the cognitive designer, 80% want to use it for strategic differentiation.