Cognitive Design

I occasionally work with graduate students at Northwestern University to reverse engineer designs that have exceptional impact on cognition or how we think-and-feel. The goal is to discover what unique set of cognitive needs they satisfy and what special features/functions they deploy that move our hearts and minds so effectively.

A student recently sent a link to Questing for Well-Being at Weight Watchers, that reveals some insight into the unique set of cognitive needs the program satisfies:

“We find that among Weight Watchers members in the United States, the support group acts as a venue for angst?alleviating therapeutic confession, fosters the enactment of the support group as a benevolent system of therapeutic oversight, and facilitates a revitalizing practice of autotherapeutic testimonial.”

In short it relieves negative emotions associated with set-backs, makes members comfortable with surrendering some control to the group and promotes wellbeing through helping others.  Weight Watchers is effective at achieving sustained weight loss for its members.  One reason it works is that it attends to cognitive needs that other programs fail to meet.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Behavior Change, Examples, Psychographics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.