Design to Make Customers Naturally Smarter!
The ScienceDaily blog reviews yet another new report on the incidental brain/cognitive training impact of playing video games. Racing, Shooting and Zapping your Way to Better Visual Skills, reports:
“According to a new study in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, regular gamers are fast and accurate information processors, not only during game play, but in real-life situations as well.”
And here is the skinny:
Playing video games enhances performance on mental rotation skills, visual and spatial memory, and tasks requiring divided attention.
In short, playing the right type of video games strengthens visual cognition automatically or incidentally. What I would like to see is a study of these incidental brain training effects compared to those with software packages that have been explicitly engineered to improve visual cognition.
Cognitive designer’s delight in such examples because they show us how to create artifacts that naturally make users smarter. Imagine remaking your product or service so that it naturally makes your customers smarter. In my workshop on cognitive design I show how you can do this with any product or service, even a paper clip. Redesigning products and services to create a think-and-feel that incidentally build customer’s mental skills is a powerful way to use cognitive design to differentiate your offering.
