Cognitive Design

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.

In my neighborhood you will see signs in some yards with kids in an action pose running toward the street.  The signs are part of a campaign to get folks to drive more safely. The images are very life-like. I have often wondered (as a cognitive designer) what could be done to maximize their effectiveness.

Recently, I received some photos from the The Crowski in Lafayette that might begin to suggest an answer.   It turns out the city of Vancouver is painting a special image of a little girl chasing a ball in the middle of the street as part of a drive safe campaign.  The image is special as it looks three dimensional (3D) when you are close.  For quick introduction check out, Vancouver Uses Image of Girl to Slow Drivers.

From a distance the image looks like a blob.  As you approach, it slowly emerges in 3D as a little girl chasing the ball.  The goal is to increase driver vigilance but not cause people to swerve or slam on their brakes.  A post on Preventable.CA  provides more details:

“* The 2D decal gradually appears 3D to drivers approaching the image. A risk assessment of this project shows that drivers do not mistake this image for a real girl and can see the image 100 feet away. The image does not “jump-out” at drivers and there is no “startling effect”, the road conditions on 22nd Street are very good for this project, which is precisely why this location was selected.  Sight lines are perfect northbound along the road and to the cross streets.  Although the community continuously grapples with unsafe driving behaviours in this particular school zone, twenty-second (22nd) Street in West Vancouver has a very good vehicle crash record.”

What do you think?

McKinsey just released 2010 results of their global survey on innovation and commercialization. It is all good news for the cognitive designer.

First, 84% of the executives asked indicated that innovation was extremely or very important for their firm.  This should create strong demand for designers able to create new products, services and experiences that meet the cognitive needs of customers in simplified or unique ways.

Second, as firms turn towards innovation-based growth strategies they are facing the same organizational barriers that they have tried to overcome many times before. According to the survey:

Further, many of the challenges—finding the right talent, encouraging collaboration and risk taking, organizing the innovation process from beginning to end—are remarkably consistent. Indeed, surveys over the past few years suggest that the core barriers to successful innovation haven’t changed, and companies have made little progress in surmounting them.

While the suggested improvements  in the article are strong – formalize the prioritization process and link innovation to strategic planning – they miss the mark. Past efforts to enable organizational innovation have failed because we have neglected the cognitive factors. From a cognitive design standpoint the key questions are:

How do the minds of organizational innovators really work? What psychological needs, work practices, cognitive biases and mental models make them tick?

We need to answer these questions for all the key stakeholder groups – executives overseeing innovation, employee innovators, customer co-innovators and supplier collaborators.

                       Image source: Innovation Playground 

Not having these answers will result in poorly designed innovation programs and processes. Take for example this survey finding:

 As in the past, executives have the most difficulty stopping ideas at the right time, with only 26 percent of respondents to this survey saying they do this well.

I can try to stop ideas at the right time by designing a formal approach to prioritization but that will have little impact if I don’t understand the cognitive biases at work in setting and following priorities especially when “pet ideas” are involved.

Innovation at both the individual and organizational level is an inherently cognitive-political process.  No matter what programs and processes we design to stimulate it, the cognitive (intellectual, emotional, volitional and motivational) needs and political realities of the key stakeholder groups must be well understood and satisfied. This puts the cognitive designer center stage.

Entries for Scientific American’s World Changing Ideas Video Contest are due September 15th. They are looking for 2-5 minute videos that describe innovative ways to build a cleaner, healthier and safer world.  Winners get written up in Scientific American (great exposure).   Entries are judged on impact, scientific merit, originality, entertainment value and production quality. You can read about last year’s 20 winning entries to get an idea of what made the grade in 2009.

This contest is an excellent opportunity to exercise your talent in design thinking. For example, imagine how much cleaner, healthier and safer the world would be if we had low cost, high reliability, easy to use and noninvasive brain-machine interfaces?

We are fast becoming a culture of self trackers. We have smart phone apps, widgets, software packages and hundreds of gadgets for monitoring every aspect of daily life.  We measure and track our eating, walking, shopping, sleeping, exercising, socializing, child rearing, medication-taking  and online activities. We measure moods, weight, calories, ounces, blood pressure, heart rate,  time spent on tasks, the number of cups of coffee we drinks, our geographical locations during the day and many other personal variables. According to Wired Magazine we are Living by the Numbers.

Motivations for self-measuring vary but it is exploding because technology is making it easier to do and personal informatics feeds the core cognitive need to know about ourselves over time and how we compare to others.

The cognitive design blog has covered a couple dozen personal informatics tools and gadgets and how they can be used in behavior change. But that is the tip of the iceberg. Here is a list of some 200 popular tools for collecting and analyzing information about yourself.  My favorite blog on the topic is The Quantified Self.  For a good general overview check out the New York Times article, The Data Driven Life or the piece in the Wall Street Journal, The New Examined Life.

The field of personal analytics and informatics offers significant opportunities for the cognitive designer. There is the challenge of how to collect the most relevant personal data in or near real-time while keeping the cost and cognitive load down.  Also, cognitive designers can contribute to defining products, services and experiences that leverage the personal data that is collected to create value in new ways.

The field appears to be wide open. Very interested to hear from readers that are active in the area and have opinions, lessons or resources relevant to designers.

When we are trying to change behaviors (smoking, spending, eating, etc.) it is natural to think about doing the very things we are trying to change. This has led some to advocate thought suppression as behavior change strategy. If you want to stop smoking for example, every time you find yourself thinking about smoking, stop and think about something else.  The idea is that if you are not thinking about it you are less likely to do it.

This is a common sense strategy but it will backfire.  

There is plenty of evidence that suggests suppressed thoughts reassert themselves with a vengeance.  If I try and avoid thinking about smoking I just end up thinking about it more!  But worse, recent scientific studies show there is also a behavioral rebound.  For example, the Research Digest Blog reports in Stubbing out thoughts of smoking leads smokers to end up smoking more:

 ”The main finding was that smokers in the suppression group smoked less than others during the middle week while they were suppressing smoking-related thoughts, but ended up smoking significantly more than the other smokers in the final week. In other words, trying to avoid thinking about smoking had a short term benefit but ultimately led to more smoking later on.” 

The same researchers also reported suppressing thoughts about chocolate leads to eating more of it.   The fact that it produces a short term win but fails in the longer term is especially important. This has clear implications for cognitive designer working on behavior change programs.