Use The New Science of Happiness to Design Your Next Product or Event
Over the last few years there has been a small flurry of books and papers on the “new science of happiness” – an attempt to use neuropsychology and cognitive science to understand what makes us happy and why. Good stuff for cognitive designers interested in creating artifacts that invoke happiness in users.
Check out the Jan-Feb 2007 issue of Harvard Magazine for recent overview. It covers all the basics and highlights how Harvard’s class on Happiness 101 (actually titled Positive Psychology) was the most popular in 2006 pulling in over 800 students.
A somewhat dated but still excellent source with findings specific enough to guide design can be found in a Time Magazine article The New Science of Happiness.
So what do you do if you what to design artifacts to put users in the mental state of happiness? You can include features and functions that:
1. Involve or trigger a remembrance of friends and family. For example, personalization of your PC desktop with a family or baby photo, discount calling plans for friends and families and adding online social networking features to your software product or content.
2. Allow users to otherwise engage in an acts of kindness or altruistic acts. Interesting recent examples include XO (the give one get one laptop) and Free Rice (play a vocabulary game and for each word you get right they donate 20 grains of rice through the UN to help end World hunger).
3. Naturally limit (but not eliminate) the number of choices the user must make to use the product (too much choice is the enemy of happiness). For example, some financial services companies have adopted the “option packages” strategy from the automotive industry to bundle decisions about many choices into one (lifestage asset allocation funds or feature bundles for life and annuity policies).
4. Allow users to express their blessings or joys in an authentic and meaningful way. For example, a comfortable way of expressing thankfullness for a spouse or family member in public.
Adding features and functions that stimulate happiness in users is one way to approach cognitive design.
