UCD14 Talk - Pete Trainor - Is There a Neurological Recipe for Success? #NeuroCX
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Pete Trainor - Is There a Neurological Recipe for Success? #NeuroCX How can we design experiences that are intrinsically baked with success? Experiences that force users to learn new tricks and as a by-product modify behaviour and in some cases become new habits. How do we reward attention rather than demand it? The brain is genetically wired to react to positivity, releasing the neurotransmitter dopamine into an area of the brain called The Reward Center when a positive experience is encountered… which in turn teaches the body the difference between what is good & what is bad. But can we actually tap into the brains Reward Center and use it to make an experience something users will want to return too again and again? During this session I will unpack the nexus of my rules for neuroCX; – Joygasms – Expanding scenarios linked to sustained progress and instant gratification – Kudos – The encouragement of altruism – Commas – Experiences that are repeated, interrupted & never end You’ll learn about the brain. The neurology behind experiences and the framework for creating a neurological recipe for success.
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UCD14 Talk - Pete Trainor - Is There a Neurological Recipe for Success? #NeuroCX
- 23. and Pause… …REFLECT. SO WHAT?
Editor's Notes
- My name is Pete from Nexus in London. I stood up at SXSW this year and gave SOME of this thinking. You guys get the full wedge. It’s basically about how designed experiences effect the body and the brain Which is pretty cool when you stop and think about it throughout my dialog with you. The reason I wanted to do this presentation at SXSW because it’s something that genuinely changed the way I do design But also the way I consume design. We’ll start with a bit of background about me and why I’m here. Followed by a quick biology lesson just to really baffle you. Then we’ll go through some rules I’ve created for really getting people engaged with design. We’ll finish with a bit of a summary. Ready?
- Makes sense for me to kick off by setting the scene a little bit. There's a whole backstory to me & this talk that I hope paints a picture of 'why' I bothered in the first place < PAUSE > I started my career in design 1995 when I left school & it led me merrily all the way to 2009... That was a big year for me... I'd been head of UX at various big agencies like TBWA & JWT . Then in 2009 took a massive leap of faith and did start-up. Who remembers a product called mflow? Nope. Figured not. The greatest product that nobody ever used. We created a music sharing platform that was so wonderful. So potent in its thinking. It was a great time. We hired the brightest and the best. We invested £9m give or take in that thing. The best UX, the best Design. Technical perfection. Massive flop. MASSIVE. People downloaded that thing in their tens of thousands but nobody USED it. I left the company I helped set up to go back to normality and the team remoulded it into Bloom.fm, but ultimately that failed too. It haunted me for a long long time that experience because like many designers, we don't like to lose. However, I did learn my first neurological lesson during that time & it's an aside rather than the meat of this talk today. Leave your comfy agency jobs and your corporate desks and go do start-up. It's the greatest form of professional CBT you can do. It totally rewires your connection to the customer Changes your perceived skills Changes your daily work patterns and routines. It's mentally very very liberating & it changed me into a different kind of designer. I'm more open minded and curious now. But that's not the real reason I'm here today, just a bit of professional wisdom. So - Today I want to take you through something else I've done to free my mind & look at design differently. Biology. A lot of you won't agree with what I say today & to those people I say "that's amazing", let's debate it at the end. Let's disagree, let's invent and challenge and iterate my thinking. Think of today as day zero. I pass my thinking on to you guys, some of you toss it into the mental bin as total tripe, but some of you grow that seed into a sapling. That's really the secret of the brain. Curiosity and creating curiosity.
- Even before the age of Mad Men, marketers were trying to tap into the human subconscious basically influence consumers to buy their products. And you could argue that we, in the UX community have always been in the habit-forming business - we build products meant to persuade people to do what we want them to do. Since advertising began, the mass public has been influenced by the images they walk past, see in the press and have beamed into their eyes through their TVs. Smirnoff as an example used a technique called ZMET in their advertising throughout the 2000s. Has anybody ever heard of ZMET? Do you even realise that advertising companies have used neuroscientists for years to make advertising subconsciously manipulate you? The Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique. Images were manipulated in the shape of the Smirnoff bottle to make the passer-by stop and study the shot. "The essence of ZMET reduces to exploring the human unconscious with specially selected sets of images that cause a positive emotional response and activate hidden images, metaphors stimulating the purchase". Pretty cool huh. And that's one of the things I've been trying to find out since the flop of mflow. How come we didn't turn that beautiful beast into a habit? Can it ACTUALLY be done? Can design be taken down to a contrived level of biological reductionism? The answer is no of course, people are too complex to be manipulated on mass, but there is an awful lot we can do to help the process along the way.
- Who’s ever come across the famous Stanford Marshmallow test? Originally conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel in the late 1960s the Stanford marshmallow test has become a touchstone of developmental psychology. Children at Stanford’s Bing Nursery School, aged four to six, were placed in a room furnished only with a table and chair. A single treat, selected by the child, was placed on the table. Each child was told if they waited for 15 minutes before eating the treat, they would be given a second treat. Then they were left alone in the room. It’s basically a temptation test. Our generation face a version of the marshmallow test nearly every waking minute of every day. However we’re not tempted by sugary treats, but by our browser tabs, phones, tablets, and now even our bloody watches All the devices that connect us to the global delivery system for those blips of information that do to us what marshmallows do to pre-schoolers. TEMPTATION. Our brains developed a response mechanism to these treats that reflected their value a surge of interest and excitement, a feeling of reward and satisfaction which we find tremendously pleasurable. As we’ve reshaped the world around us we still have the same brains we evolved thousands of years ago and this mismatch is at the heart of why so many of us struggle to resist tempting foods that we know we shouldn’t eat. A similar process is at work in our response to information. Our formative environment as a species was information-poor as well as calorie-poor. The features of that environment - and specifically the members of our immediate community and our interactions with them — typically changed rarely and gradually. Just as our brains developed a response mechanism that prized sugary treats, we evolved to pay close attention to new information about the people around us and our interactions with them. We are now ceaselessly bombarded with new information about the people around us — and the definition of “people around us” has fundamentally changed, putting us in touch with more people in an hour than early humans met in their entire lives. All of this poses a critical challenge to our brains - the adult version of the marshmallow test. Not only are we constantly interrupted by alerts, alarms, beeps, and buzzes that tell us some new information has arrived, we constantly interrupt ourselves to seek out new information. We pull out our phones while we’re in the middle of a conversation with someone. We check our email while we’re engaged in a complex task that requires our full concentration. We scan our feeds even though we just checked them a minute ago.
- How do people REALLY make decisions? Every day you make thousands of decisions, big and small, and behind all them is a powerful battle in your mind, pitting intuition against logic. This conflict affects every aspect of your life - from what you eat to what you believe, and especially to how you spend your time. It also turns out that the intuitive part of your mind is a lot more powerful than we may realise When we do something out of habit, we use little or no cognitive effort. Most of us don’t spend a long time each morning deliberating on what to eat for breakfast or how to travel to work, such daily routines have quickly become ingrained habits. Consumers are taking technology to bed now too - which is brilliant for us as designers. When they wake up they check their notifications, tweets, and updates even before they've even said good morning to their loved ones. HOW MANY OF YOU HERE HAVE ACTUALLY LOOKED AT YOUR TWEETS BEFORE YOUVE SAID GOOD MORNING TO YOUR LOVED ONE LYING NEXT TO YOU? Consider this as a brain tip...
- In 2012 I started working with the Behavioral Finance Team at one of the UKs biggest banks on a project that we nicknamed Investor Conscious. Emily Haisley, Greg Davis, Antonia Lin, Peter Brooks - those people blew my mind. What we wanted to do was see if we could design an experience that would change an investors actual behaviour; - break bad habits - encourage existing good ones - And possibly even create whole new ones They knew there were triggers in the brain that can be inflounced to modify a persons deep engrained behavioral biases And possibly even change how often and how attached someone can became to a service, app, game, tool or product. What they needed was to funnel their thinking into a right brainer called Trainor to realise the dream. The real test of this brief was could we actually create and influence people? Imagine that... A piece of design thinking, a set of mechanisms designed to engage directly with a persons habits. My salvation and liberation from the mflow reoccurring nightmare. We didn't want to create something addictively creepy like FarmVille, but we did want to see if we could; Reward attention rather than Demand it. First big big lesson right there. Sounds basic, but that's the crux of designing services. By doing this you create a deeper connection with the customer by making them feel like they really got better at something and progress. What I learnt on my little adventure with Greg and co was pretty neat. I'm going to share some of those.experience principles and hopefully open your eyes to HOW we can start to create experiences that might actually be able to change the way brands connect with their customers.
- Before I go into the actionable elements of my talk, I want to take you on a journey through a very simple piece of interface design from the last few years… possibly THE most simple piece of design and it’s impact on the brain… What makes a customer open something on their phone for 9 mins a day? It's really not even that complicated. Before I give my three tips on how to do it, I'm just going to give you a quick, very crude lesson about human physiology... Now, I am neither a neurologist, a biologist, a scientist or a psychologist, so I think that absolutely qualifies me to do a this breakdown today...
- First up. There are three main parts to the human brain... - The reptilian part which deals with instinct - fight or flight. - The neo-cortex which deals with sensory perception, generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning, conscious thought & language The limbic section Which is known as the paleomammalian brain This is where learned behavior, emotions, memories and more importantly where habits are formed. Think about the make-up of the brain like this - Information + Knowledge + Experiences. It's the Limbic part where all the really neat stuff seems to be happening and where our work should really be focused. Who’s ready for a story????
- This is a cautionary tale. A real story. Something that’s happening everyday all around us and something I’ve researched at great length. For the record - the story of this type of new digital mating ritual did not exist until a few years ago, so what we're about to talk about is something totally new… A whole, uncharted set of triggers, behaviours and reactions designed in an app-developers head and released into the wild with very little thought beyond the potential to change the dating game. For me - This proves that we really are at the frontier of HCI now. Welcome to Tinder. You're in a bar. You've just found three people in close proximity to you on Tinder that you find attractive, so you've swiped them to the right to let them know you're nearby & interested. Each swipe with your finger sets off a small chain-reaction of events within your body that can be as narcotic as crack. The game is on. You close the app and start to slide your phone back into your pocket and then IT happens... The vibration occurs almost the second the device is inside your pocket and you know somebody might just have reciprocated your virtual advance Either that or your mum has just texted to tell you not to get too drunk & be quiet when you come in.
- Even before the moment you receive that good vibration telling you that you might have scored, some very interesting things are already occurring inside your body. When you found those three potential mates in the bar and flicked them across to the right with your thumb, your body went into adrenaline high-alert, waiting in anticipation for that reciprocal swipe to the right. Now that you've actually received one, your body is going full throttle through the gears of excitement, stress, anxiety and joy.
- In the time it takes for you to take your phone back out of your pocket and unlock it, the hypothalamus sends a message instructing your adrenal gland to produce even more of the hormone testosterone. Testosterone is what we call an anabolic steroid and one seriously potent chemical. As the hormone fans out across your body it will start to have its physical effect on your physiology almost instantaneously. It also returns to the brain, changing the very way you are going to think and behave.
- Using one little app you just went back through 30,000 years of evolution to your primitive Neanderthal roots… Biologically speaking anyway.
- OK - So before I go on… and before we go too far down this path of biological reductionism though, I have to point out that hormones do NOT cause behaviour. What they do is act more like lobby groups, recommending and pressuring us into certain types of activity and behaviour. Your brain does NOT have to comply to when a hormone attacks. If you are on a diet, or a religious fast, or a hunger strike, you can choose to ignore the messages of hunger. You can, in other words, choose your own actions, and ultimately take responsibility for them. Nonetheless, with the passing of time and repetition, the biological message, at first whispered can become more like a fog-horned bellow, and that can be hard to resist.
- The hypothalamus is a brain region found by projecting lines in from the bridge of your nose and sideways from the front of your ears, regulates our hormones, and through them our eating, sleeping, sodium levels, water retention, reproduction, aggression and so on. It acts as the main integration site for emotional behaviour, in other words it coordinates the hormones and the brain stem and the emotional behaviours into a coherent bodily response. When, for example, an angry cat hisses, and arches its back, and fluffs its fur, and secretes adrenalin, it is the hypothalamus that has assembled these separate displays of anger and orchestrated them into a single coherent emotional act.
- In that bar when you received the green light to advance to first base, the hypothalamus just did the same thing to you as it did to that hissing cat. In literally milliseconds it totally re-engineered your whole body for the task that's about to start. Testosterone just increased your confidence and appetite for risk. Even if the next move you make fails and they decide you are just not worthy of them, male or female, you will have emerged with much higher levels of testosterone than when you first entered into the bar. However, had you lost the game completely, and you had been left hanging because they'd swiped you to the left, the opposite would have happened and you would have unknowingly found yourself with a much lower level of testosterone. Good news though with those elevated levels of testosterone, and this androgenic priming you now have the edge, making your reactions much quicker. You'll find yourself beating any others to the swipe, sending the Push & Ping quicker than ever before. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy of primal, digital joy that turns all the winners into adrenaline junkies... Literally.
- This is the really important bit. Over the years Scientists have replicated these effects with athletes, and believe the testosterone feedback loop may actually explain winning and losing streaks in sports. Think about that for a second - this is NOT gamification is too limited a phase people. This is total body re-engineering using your thumb, an app and a photo of someone. We are creating a whole new generation of people riding waves of hormone fuelled adventure. It’s simply put, un-fucking-beliavable and such an exciting moment in time to be designing. You’d never thought about the physiological effects of our work on people before had you?
- Finally - Dopamine. Good old Dopamine. My favourite neurotransmitter If there were a celebrity among brain chemicals, it would be dopamine. It's forever linked to salacious stories of sex, drugs and wild partying in the popular press. The Kim Kardashian of neurotransmitters if you like. It might also be an experience designers secret weapon... When a person encounters an experience and its deemed a sensation i.e that was amazing or that was terrible signals created in the cerebral cortex release the chemical dopamine into the MESO-LIMBIC pathway A small but important brain tract that connects a deep brain area called the NUCLEUS ACCUMBENS near the frontal lobes. More elegantly, it's what we call The Reward Centre The Reward Centre attempts to regulate and control behavior by inducing pleasurable effects. When you activate the reward Center after a behavior, it causes the probability of that behaviors occurrence to increase. It's how positive experiences remain engrained with an individual. We are literally genetically programmed to remember the first and last things we experience and if we really like them we repeat them over and over until they become ... ... a habit.
- There are some other factors at play during this little explosion of bodily reactions too. Research in experimental psychology has found that perceptual acuity and general levels of attention increase as more senses are involved. In other words, vision becomes more acute when coupled with touch, touch with smell, smell with audio etc. The explanation ventured for these findings is that information arriving from two or more senses instead of just one increases the probability that it is reporting a real event, so our brain takes it more seriously. By virtue of being hunting in the wild and the digital signals coming out you in this urban environment, your brain is even more fired up than normal. Sounds obvious I know, but it's a huge factor in the explanation of the success of mobile. It’s also how you have to start thinking about design. Design for more than one-sense and the brain will start to notice your work more.
- Here’s another interesting variable. The brain is actually quite a slow processor and has quite a neat trick that saves you from your fatally slow consciousness. When fast reactions are demanded it cuts out consciousness altogether and relies instead on reflexes, automatic behaviour and what it called 'pre-attentive processing’. Pre-attentive processing is a type of perception, decision-making and movement initiation that occurs without any consultation with your conscious brain, and before it is even aware of what is going on. So in that busy environment - the urban world - because of all the factor and stimulants around you, there is a large amount of auto-pilot going on. A much different set of bodily functions being ignited than in the early days of say, online dating, when everything was desktop based.
- My other favourite part of the brain is called the “uh-mig-duh-luh” It assigns emotional significance to events. Without the amygdala, we would view the world as a collection of uninteresting options. A charging bear in the woods would impress us as nothing more threatening than a large, moving object. Bring the amygdala online, and miraculously the grizzly morphs into the terrifying and deadly predator and we scramble up the nearest tree. The amygdala is the key brain region registering events in the outside world and initiating the suite of physical changes known as the 'stress response’.
- There are only a few moments in this talk where I’m going to go all psycho science on you… This is one… In scientific lingo, the stress response system is called the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA axis). After perceiving a stressor from the Amygdala, the hypothalamus sends a chemical message to the pituitary gland. From here a new chemical message is sent out of the brain through our blood, to the producers of stress hormones called the adrenal glands that sit on top of the kidneys. This message has caused another hormone to start leaking out of a adrenal glands and across your body at the same time as the testosterone takes it grip, and this hormone is the really interesting one Meet Cortisol Cortisol is another steroid hormone, more specifically a glucocorticoid, in the adrenal cortex. It is released in response to stress and anxiety. Cortisol works in tandem with adrenaline, but while adrenalin is a fast-acting hormone, taking effect in seconds and having a half-life in the blood of only two to three minutes, cortisol kicks in to support us during a long siege. So what I hear you say… this guy is mad to even be talking to us about this stuff…
- Imagine the game of Tinder you're playing is like hiking in the woods and you hear a rustle in the bushes, you may suspect the presence of a grizzly bear, so the shot of adrenalin you receive is designed to carry you clear of that danger. If that noise you hear turns out to be nothing but the wind in the leaves you settle down, and the adrenalin quickly dissipate. But if you are in fact being stalked by a predator and the chase lasts several hours, then cortisol takes over the management of your body. It orders all long-term and metabolically expensive functions of the body, such as digestion, reproduction, growth, storage of energy, and after a while even the immune function, to stop. At the same time, it begins to break down energy stores and flush the liberated glucose into your blood. In short, cortisol has one main far-reaching command: glucose now! So these people who spend hours glued to little apps like Tinder or whatever… every time they pull out your phone to play, if its for a couple of seconds you’re running off Adreneline… great… If however you’re spending hours at it then you’re running off Coritsol, which has in effect ordered a complete re-tooling of your body's factories, away from leisure and consumption goods and ready for all out war.
- Think about it for a moment... In that moment between push & ping, we as designers are changing the actual physiology of our audience. Never has the term USER experience been more appropriate than in todays world. Clever, huh?! The point is this, and I cannot emphasise it enough: when faced by situations of novelty, uncertainty, opportunity or choice, you FEEL the things you do because of changes taking place in your brain AND your body as it prepares for action. In the brain, cortisol, like testosterone, initially has the beneficial effects of increasing arousal and sharpening attention, even promoting a slight thrill from the challenge, but as levels of the hormone rise and stay elevated, it comes to have the opposite effects - there is a difference between short-term and long-term exposure to a hormone and that is a very important distinction to remember. Pretty potent stuff.
- Three core principles for stimulating those magic dopamine & hormone bombs to go off. Joygasms - Expanding scenarios linked to sustained progress and instant gratification Kudos - The encouragement of altruism Commas - Experiences that are repeated, interrupted & never end Lets take a look at these experience principles.
- Rule 1 JOYGASMS Expanding scenarios linked to sustained progress and instant gratification. Giving people incentives and information is not necessarily enough anymore. Everyone needs to feel involved and effective in a scenario to feel like they achieved something. And when they achieve something positive, BOOM, good feelings. Giving people an opportunity to focus their energy, with relentless optimism, at something they can get better at encourages the brain to respond with dopamine rewards much in the same way that it does with things like food, and sex and social interactions You feel good about reaching your goal. Every action we design should have an explicit goal. What we also discovered in task based reward mechanisms is that the new learned behavior also leads to extraverted behaviour. Also producing positive emotions and feelings of desire motivate us to work toward obtaining those rewards even more. Take a practical example we tested... Application forms... We created years ago "inline errors", asynchronous red messages that tell a customer off for filling in a wrong email address or password that doesn't match. Simple thing - create inline WELL DONE MESSAGES. You literally want to continue to do it and repeat the reward again. What also became very clear to us, is that when we're encouraged to participate in highly structured, self-motivated tasks, we regularly achieve the greatest form of happiness available to human beings Satisfaction. The feeling that you're getting better at something. There's another Joygasm trick here too... Make sure the actual reward at the end of the task is variation... You've got to mix it up. For example, the predictable response of your fridge light turning on when you open the door doesn't drive you to keep opening it again and again. (Unless you happen to be my 1 year old daughter of course). However, add some variability to the mix - say a different treat magically appearing in the fridge every time you open it, and voila, desire is created. You'll be opening that door like a lab rat in a Skinner box. Nike Fuel is a great example of a mechanism that nailed this with their task > reward feedback loop. You're working hard, getting fitter, but you're also receiving a myriad of little nods and thumbs up and badges and stuff. Jawbone is a better utility, but Nike are a better communicator. They're not stupid either, science went into that. Research shows that dopamine surges when the brain is expecting a reward too, not just earning it. So introducing variability multiples that effect.
- And a dude I met in Texas in March called Yukai Chou helped me group joygasms into 8 categories using what he calls it Octalysis. 8 moments of delight. Giving Meaning. Encourage Empowerment. Allow Social Influence. Introduce Unpredictability. Don’t be scared about introducing a little Avoidance. Makes things Scarce. Let Ownership Occur. Always let the audience Accomplish things.
- Here's another Joygasm trigger… Giving the user choices against an action or task... Making them masters of the destiny... I call it the the four D's; - Do - Drop - Diarise - Delegate Total control to choose. When you’re young, other people orchestrate your enjoyment of life your parents keep you entertained, and in college your friends make sure you’re OK. But after that, the scaffolding of having control is taken away, and nobody is telling you how to provide that for yourself. The brain doesn’t change though… the external factors do… so playing to that ideal of control is the thing. It's our job to keep little mister grey stimulated by baking in control. The four d's. Into everything. Choices.
- Here's an interesting aside… Almost ANTI USABILITY. Hate is neurologically more similar to love than it is to fear, anger or disgust. Seriously - in EEGs we see hate for something eliciting the same reaction as love. Watch this for a second & I'll take you through what you're watching. It's real frontier stuff. If you're going to do SOMETHING and you can't make it good, at the very least make it crappy enough that people hate it.
- Loss Aversion is another huge one. Take away the shining thing! Most people strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. One way to get going with this is to give people something right away that they can lose (unless they keep playing). When you join Farmville, you get a starter farm. If you dont visit the farm and care for your crops, they wither and die. Within a task that leads to a reward please remember the following: 1. Give users motivation to do something (emotional investment, promise of reward, etc.). 2. The ability to complete the action. 3. And finally, a trigger or cue to complete the action. Pretty basic stuff but often overlooked. With mflow we screwed some of the basics here up. Silly things like not letting the consumer know why they should be bothering in the first place. Duh.
- Rule 2 (The encouragement of altruism) Since the beginning of time most people are motivated to do the right thing. There are cases where say, money is de-motivating as it undermines peoples intrinsic motivation. For example, you would quickly stop inviting friends to dinner if they insisted on paying you. Altruism is a massive trigger for the Reward Center. MRI studies reveal that when we perform an act of kindness, the Reward Center is aroused and we experience feelings of pleasure because Dopamine bombs are dropping all over the place. Those do gooders... Totally tripping their little pickles off with love and joy. The brain is flooded with happiness-inducing dopamine whenever we share something we think other people might find useful. Or when we help out someone deemed to be in need, or worse off than ourselves. Think about it, why do we Tweet? Why do we share links on Facebook? Irrationally too... "Oh 32 followers mainly family and colleagues, you're going to love this article" Junkies. All of us. Its all about recognition. Stand well back, The Ego Has Landed. Observing other peoples altruistic behavior matters too: People do many things by observing others and copying; And People are encouraged to continue to do things when they feel other people not only approve of their behavior, but are behaving in the same way. Its the Eternal Return... Good feeling invites good feeling... So we have to absolutely make sure we bake in viral loops and enough opportunities for a consumer to share, give feedback to each other and do good things.
- Status, competition and reputation. Most people inherently want a higher status and not only to keep up, but to out-do the Joneses. This is why leaderboards work. I'm not a fan, I find them a bit contrived, but they have a purpose. Also, making achievements social encourages people to continually one-up, and stay motivated to reach clear goals.
- Rule 3 (Experiences that are repeated, interrupted & never end) This is the biggy. The really important one. The previous two rules are just Gamification and Social Media. If you want to boil it down to simplicity - although for the record I hate the term gamification, it's such sloppy marketing slang for something way more fascinating. Whats hugely important is that all of our projects turn into a series of commas and not full-stops. Bluma Zeigarnik was a Soviet psychologist and psychiatrist and a member of Berlin School of experimental psychology. She discovered what we now refer to in UX rather originally as the Zeigarnik effect. The Zeigarnik effect states that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks. Zeigarnik noticed that a waiter had better recollections of still unpaid orders. However, after the completion of the task after everyone had paid he or she was unable to remember any more details of the orders. When a task ends, we literally forget it. In order to keep our experiences front of mind (literally) and keep the consumers coming back for more, we need to make sure it never has a solid conclusion. When it ends, it becomes just another piece of advertising. Literally keep them guessing and coming back for more. Its the old school cliff-hanger every day & with every task. What happens next? We cannot let our stories come to a conclusion we have to cut the consumer off because... PAUSE FOR DRAMATIC EFFECT ...when we make them wait for more the brain starts to crave it. Welcome to habit. Break our joygasms & kudos moments up over periods of time that never end. Cross channel and engrained in real life, offline and online. So go off people and buy some really good literature on CRM and take the seeds of science out of that and sprinkle it over your designed moments.
- Have you ever wondered why the customer experience is a journey, not a destination? It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end. “Destination” means to me that there’s an endpoint; you’ve arrived, and it’s over. I don’t believe we ever want to rest on our laurels and be satisfied that we’re delivering the best experience possible. When we engage with customers (or, when they engage with us), we are (hopefully) engaging for the long-term, developing a relationship. We want customer relationships, not just customer transactions. And relationships take time and work, every day; the focus and the desire to keep the relationship alive and strong should never stop because, when it does, the relationship will end. That never-ending focus – that’s the journey. Along similar lines, every transaction or interaction, when combined, sums up to the total experience. While we need to ensure that we deliver a great experience during each interaction, if one of those interactions breaks down, it doesn’t have to be the be-all-end-all. We don’t give up. We work to correct and recover and then do better at the next interaction. That’s the journey. Those of you capable of focusing on delivering a great experience at each interaction, at each touchpoint - but, importantly, don’t lose site of the bigger picture, the journey - will find success. And finally, the customer experience is the sum of all the experiences along the customer lifecycle, and that lifecycle is often represented as an infinite loop. We want an infinite loop; it means our customers are with us for the long haul. That’s the journey.
- Feedback on where they are in this infinite journey. Super important. Feedback tells users that their intended actions are being registered, and shows the outcomes of those actions. Seeing points accumulate establishes a clear and instant trigger for the reward system. Its also an immediate indication that the consumer is getting closer to their goal or simply getting better. Continually accomplishing small goals in order to reach a larger goal is often what makes something highly addictive.
- There’s one last thing that wraps up my final, binding rule… Scenarios that never end are stories. When we’re presented with information & Fact two main areas in our brain light up – Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area. However - When we’re processing stories multiple brain regions are activated. The Sensory cortex and cerebellum - associated with processing texture and sensation. The Motor cortex which deals with physical movement. The Olfactory cortex which deals with smell or memories of smells. The Visual cortex that deals with colour and shape. And the Auditory cortex which processes sound.
- Who here is a fan of Chopin? Shame on you. Concerto No.1 in E Minor for Piano & orchestra - OP11 II Is possibly one of the greatest pieces of design from the last 200 years. It takes you on a Rollercoaster of ups and downs and twists and turns. It's melodic and then frustrating. Just when you think it's about to finish it carries on. Plug in and listen to it when you want inspiration about how to super charge your service or design. If you're creating Chopinistic experiences you're onto a true winner.
- So heres the crucial point - These principles Ive just gone through are not new. Most of you have probably sat here and gone “So what, he’s banging on about Gamfication, Social Media and CRM”. In fact all these things are as old as the hills in digital terms But its the NEXUS of these three things combined that creates genuine habits and wholesale behavioural change. The proof of it is all around us. Independently they have weight and substance, combined they become something very potent and very powerful.
- In October last year Apple announced that they have about 1million apps in the App Store & about 60 billion downloads. Statistically about 0.5% of those apps are used on a REGULAR basis. That's 5000 out of 1 million. So what makes those 5000 winners other than the fact that a lot of stuff in the App Store is simply not very good? Simple - when you strip away the genre differences & technical complexities, they all share 3 traits; - Joygasms - Kudos - Commas They all follow similar patterns and fire the brains synapses in the same kinds of ways. Whether they're games or tools or just social networks, they all share the same traits. - Clash of Clans / Social Gaming - Nike Fuel, Jawbone, Fitbit - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, KickStarter There’s a lot of good we can do with neurological recipes. With all the rhetoric in the press at the moment about the morality of this supposed “brainfluence", what I want to say to you is this: Is Weight Watchers wrong? One of the most successful mass-behavioral change products in history? Was that and is that wrong? Think about it.
- I've distilled these three principles down from many observed human traits and from the fields of psychology, behavioral and experimental economics and lots of research from lots of really smart people. Its not exhaustive; there are many more nuances of course. But what I'll end by saying is that regardless of whether you are a business owner, a designer, a technologist, a content writer, a creative director, a strategist, young, old, active, passive, inspired or uninspired, when you leave here today I want you to think about your Brain more. Record what makes you giddy, makes you smile, turns you on and equally all the opposites... Because in those patterns are the answers to your challenges. Don’t just look at text books or academia. Screw usability for a while, it’s dull. Don’t just reach for Google for the answers... You already have the the answers in your head. What makes you happy or sad is what will make your product become part of the fabled 5000. It's what will make your services sticky & enjoyable. Drop Dopamine bombs, have joygasms & earn Kudos
- Final slide - A bunch of people gave me inspiration and contributed to my thinking, but here are the crew that have to be cited; Nir Eyal is one of the most disruptive neuroscientists in the field at the moment and his book "Hooked" is amazing. He was really supportive and helped to validate, contribute and critique my thinking. Nathalie Nahai is mind-bendingly captivating... her book "Webs of Influence" is amazing & should be read. Stephen Genco wrote NeuroMarketing for dummies and gave me counsel for purely altruistic reasons. He helped move my thinking forward. Any of his work is worth looking at for inspiration. Finally go and read a book called “The Hour Between Dog and Wolf” by John Coates. It is unbelievable. Have fun & stay curious. Thank you