Cognitive Design

One major goal of cognitive design is to create artifacts that put customers in a particular frame of mind or mental state.  Such states include pleasure, excitement, flow, pride, fear, sorrow, feeling safe, awe, self confidence, in touch with the past and so on. Putting customers in specific mental states typically serves a larger purpose such as entertainment, learning or performance. They enhance the primary functionality of the artifact or act to differentiate it from competing designs.  

Cognitive designers are always on the lookout for features and functions they can add to designs that promise to create a specific mental state.  A recent article in the Chicago Journal of Consumer Research on Feeling Superior, explores the impact of the structure of loyalty programs on customers perception of status. It holds some interesting insights for cognitive designers.

 The researchers found:

“.. that increasing the number of elites in the top tier dilutes perceptions of status, while adding a subordinate tier enhances status. Tiers below the second tier do not affect those at the top but can make those in the tier immediately above feel more elite. Given the choice between alternative programs, those who do not qualify for status prefer hierarchies with multiple tiers. Finally, we show that status-laden labels (gold and silver) on their own signal an increasingly selective hierarchy.” 

These findings are not surprising but are still important. They reinforce the insight that a sense of superiority, status and power flows from a unique position in a hierarchy. This is based on a deep mental model, perhaps even an archetype, and is something we see in operation across Human cultures and throughout the animal kingdom.   

 This might also explain why “number of friends” in a social network is not the badge of honor it use to be but your position on leader-boards in online gaming still brings much ego energy.

The real challenge for cognitive designers is how to exploit this effect to create designs that make users feel unique, special and superior without directly or even incidentally demeaning others.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 8:58 am and is filed under Technique. 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.