Cognitive Design

Emotional intelligence is our ability to spot, understand and manage emotional states in ourselves and others.  It has been a topic of increasing importance to leaders but has yet to have a game-changing impact on workforce management.

Our level of emotional intelligence, or emotional quotient (EQ), can be measured and has been found to correlate strongly to high performance in some domains.  An interesting recent study by the University of Haifa looked at 809 employees in four companies and found:

“Meisler says the study indicates employees with a high level of emotional intelligence were more satisfied with their jobs and were more committed to their organizations. They also had fewer undesirable work attitudes — such as burnout, intention to leave and negligent behavior.”

This suggests that measuring EQ may be a useful tool for general workforce management. For the cognitive designer it implies that EQ measurements may provide insight into the unique cognitive needs and characteristics of employees.

Very interested to hear from designers that use EQ measurements as way to uncover cognitive needs.

Trying to control our own thoughts and behaviors especially as they relate to consumption, procrastination and truth-telling can be a real struggle.  Turns out that framing our self-control challenges as a struggle or a work task versus something that will be fun and pleasurable is self defeating. A new study reported in ScienceDaily as  Could Learning Self Control be Enjoyable?, reveals:

“Self-control failures depend on whether people see activities involving self-control (e.g., eating in moderate quantities) as an obligation to work or an opportunity to have fun,” write authors Juliano Laran (University of Miami) and Chris Janiszewski (University of Florida, Gainesville).

The study also found that reframing self control as an opportunity to have fun improved outcomes even for impulsive individuals.  Why? A pleasurable task brings intrinsic motivations and mental energy especially when it is completed. An obligation to work requires extrinsic motivation and depletes mental energy increasing the chance for a failure in self regulation.  As cognitive designers know, changing the mental energy of a task or interactions can make all the difference when it comes to shifting behaviors.

To dig in check out the free 57-page early version of the study. The details are revealing but unfortunately there is no guidance on how we can frame our thinking about specific self control tasks to take advantage of this effect.  I did find one suggestion on the CalorieLab Blog:

 ”It’s me versus the doughnut. If I resist eating this, I have won the game. Let yourself know that the cards are being dealt and the game is about to begin. Keep score and give yourself a point in your food journal. Every time you succeed, you have strengthened your healthy habits.”

Interested to hear from readers that have other ideas on how to take our self control challenges and reframe them as something fun to do.

For a $100 you can buy a headset that takes your brainwaves (EEG) and uses them to control various iPhone apps.  Make a ball float, play tug-of-mind with someone, sync your brainwaves with a song or just learn to relax. More are in the works.

Xwave runs on Neurosky’s technology so they are introducing nothing new in terms of a brain-to-machine interface.  Bringing brain interface technology to the mobile platform could really help this technology take off. Especially since ambitious cognitive designers can participate in the Brainwave Developer Program and create some game changing apps!

Hope they make one for the Droid soon.

David Rose gave a very interesting talk on how to change behavior at Transform 2010: Thinking Differently About Healthcare.  He found (through 10 years of work) that if we scrap the right information off the screens of our computers, smart phones and tablets and make it available in everyday objects behaviors will change.  This allows us to monitor things we are interested in – stock market, weather, our health- more frequently with very little cognitive load. It also means creating a special purpose device or remaking existing objects so that they are capable of information display. He calls these enchanted objects:

“The best metaphor that’s really driven me over the last 10 years or so is the idea of the “enchanted object.” This is the next logical step from Ishii’s “Things That Think” concept of ubiquitous computing: the functionality of computation and the representation of information and of communication will be embedded in many everyday objects. They will seem to be a little bit magical—delightfully easy to use and adding value to our lives a little bit at a time.”

One example, covered previously on the the Cognitive Design blog is GlowCaps or remade drug bottle caps that flash and play a ringtone when you need to take a med, automatically reorders and sends email alerts and reports to doctors and family members all designed to maximize medication compliance.

Other examples include – displays at bus stops that shows when the next bus is due to arrive, umbrellas that beep when rain is likely and a personal orb that glows to deliverable a signal the is customized to your behavior change needs.

Sometimes in my cognitive design class I will ask students to identify one picture that produces a big cognitive impact on them. I create a collage of the results and then we figure out as a group what is happening to produce the impact.

The exercises always produces a lot of energetic discussion and personal reflection on what makes the mind work. Occasionally we get some insights that are useful for project work.

Last time I did this a student suggested forming a Flickr group and throwing this task out to the crowd. Thought that was a great idea and found an existing group that fits the bill. Check out ThinkPhotos.  Upload what you have and offer comments on why you think the others photos may be turning mental gears.

The PsyBlog has an interesting post offering 10 psychological insights into the use of Twitter. Some may be relevant for cognitive designers working on twitter applications. Here are a few examples:

1. Most people join because their friends did and its free
2. Trends (specific topics) last only a few days
3. Tweets are most babble (41%) and conversational (38%)
4. Most people just watch (follow) and on average only send one tweet, ever!

Interested to hear from readers that have found scientific studies of Twitter that give psychological insight into its use.

Check out the blog, What Makes Them Tick.  It is focused on applying psychology to how people think, work and relate. It has some interesting insights for cognitive designers.  The blog is documenting 100 Things You Should Know About People and does a nice job of delivering information that is actionable for designers. For example, consider #42 we will spend more money if you don’t mention it, #38 even the illusion of progress is motivating and #4  you imagine things from above and tilted.  Many of the items on the list have been covered in the cognitive design blog but it is useful to have them all pulled together.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk runs the blog and offers a free newsletter, has a book (Neuro Web Design which I plan on reading) and does seminars. She also has 58 more posts to go on the 100 things list!

Service failure is a serious affair. Approximately 15% of front line service workers report experiencing daily abuse from angry customers that feel the company has somehow failed them.   How well the organization recovers from service failures – from both the service worker and customer perspectives – can mean big bucks. Not surprising, effective service recovery is a matter of cognitive design requiring good insight into how the minds of employees and customers really work. So I am always on the lookout for new scientific studies with designable insights.

Take for example, recent research from the University of Bath, Brands that Promise the World Make Consumers Feel Betrayed.   Researchers found that marketing that over promises can result in customers taking service failures as a personal affront. You tell someone they are special, like family or even a king and then don’t treat them that way when they arrive. This generates consumer conflict – angry, abusive and resentful behavior. Recovering from that is very different from what must be done with customers that frame service failure in a task-based way or as a matter of procedural failure not personal affront.

More specifically:

“Consumers who frame conflict in a task-based way are more focused on ensuring a practical outcome and less likely to become angry. They’re more receptive to genuine efforts by the company to restore the service and more likely to continue with the relationship…..

For consumers who frame conflict in a personal way offering compensation or restoring the service can actually make things worse. It’s more about admitting fault and going off script to acknowledge they’re in the wrong and apologise.”

This has clear implications for cognitive designers working on service recovery processes and training.

The body is the mind’s interface to the world. The body mediates every input the mind gets as well as every action taken. Body and mind co-mingle not in some mystical sense but in a way cognitive neuroscience is starting to map out. If we are to optimize our designs for how minds work, we must account for the  embodied nature of cognition in every single application.

One way to do this is to understand how the mind represents the body as an internal image,  model or schema. The mental model or internal representation we have of our body shapes all aspects of cognitive life – perception, memory, learning, decision making, creativity, self-regulation and so on. Understanding the specifics of how this works could be a treasure drove of insights for cognitive designers.

So I am always on the lookout for scientific work on body representations. Take for example the exciting new article in Psychological Science on, Rapid Assimilation of External Objects in Body Schema.  Here is what the researchers found:

Our body sense (mental model of our own bodies) is plastic and can be extended to quickly integrate any object we are touching.

The finding is robust but is limited to objects we are in direct contact with versus those the touched object may be in contact with and extending further into the environment.   This gives the tools we use and objects we hold special cognitive status. They are in fact part of us.

The Journal of Personality recently report significant research into the dimensions and underlying causes of preferences in media-based entertainment. A recent article, Listening, Watching and Reading,  reports on a study of 3000 people and their preferences for consuming different types of movies, books, music and other media-based entertainments.  Five factors of preference stood out empirically including communal, aesthetic, dark, thrilling and cerebral.

 ”Those who score highly on the Communal dimension tend to enjoy media that involve people and relationships, including: daytime chat shows, romantic films, pop music, and cook books.High scorers on the Aesthetic dimension enjoy creative, abstract material, including: poetry, opera, and foreign films.The Dark dimension relates to intense, edgy, hedonistic material, including: heavy metal, horror films and erotica.   The Thrilling Dimension is made up of adventure and fantasy material such as thrillers and sci fi.Finally, high scorers on the Cerebral dimension enjoy documentaries, news and current affairs.”

Preferences were the same across different media and were determined mostly by personality type not demographics.  The sample size and diversity of the study was good.

Such research, although preliminary, is the first I found that gives specific media consumption profiles based upon cognitive or personality needs.  It may have design implications for recommendation engines, media marketing strategies and services aimed at the 55% of our time we spending consuming entertainment media.