What Can Brain Science Teach Us About User Experience?

Marc L. Resnick, Ph.D.

Human Factors and Information Design

mresnick@bentley.edu

(781) 891-3463

Why Do We Think The Way We Do?

Somatic Markers

Which one gives us the best gut reaction?

Competition Food Safety Danger!!!

Is This Your Broker?

Stock Trading

Can we manipulate the user experience of stock trading given what we know about brain science?

� Use neutral images to counteract neurotransmitters

� Frame incoming data to model a schema with the appropriate somatic marker

� Create counter-cyclical performance management systems to mute irrational exuberance and discouragement

New Findings in . . .

This morning, we will talk about how to apply this to User Experience design, including

� Loss Aversion

� Instant Gratification

� Pre-Attentive Processing

� Motivated Reframing

� Ethical Decision Making

� Identity Resonance

What Is Brain Science?

Functional Anatomy

What Is Brain Science?

Neuro Physiology

What Is Brain Science?

Affective Cognition

What Is Brain Science?

Cognitive Neuroscience

Foundation of Today’s Talk

� There is a lot of science behind brain science

� Companies have other priorities than keeping up on the latest brain science research

� But many of these findings can provide powerful tools for understanding and designing user experience

� My job for the remainder of my time:

� show you some of these links

� how they can be used

� convert you to the cult of brain science

Instant Gratification

� We have two different neural systems to handle immediate decisions and long term decisions. When something of value is staring us in the face, the short term system generally takes over.

� This is a great tool that evolution has taught us. While economic theory has discovered the time value of money, real life teaches us that in the long run, we’re all dead.

� This leads us to order the chocolate cake for dessert today, and start the diet tomorrow.

Instant Gratification

But

� Tomorrow we are faced with the same tradeoff, so we order the chocolate cake again and start the diet the following day.

� And even worse – the short term circuitry is not well-connected to higher levels of consciousness. So often we are halfway done with the chocolate cake before we even remember the diet.

Instant Gratification

How does the design of the user experience impact short and long term decision making?

� The experience around real-time transactions will be dominated by amygdale-managed criteria

� The experience around long-term and future decisions will be dominated by pre-frontal cortex criteria.

Is there anything we can do about it?

� Use smart defaults and advanced notice for important, complicated, and quantifiable decisions

� Use more photos in the UI. Photos can enhance visceral processing of short and long term criteria.

Aging and the Hippocampus

Over time, neurons that help us encode information in to memory transform into neurons that help us retrieve information out of memory

This is a great tool that evolution has provided for us. When we are young, we need to do more learning so we have more resources to do it. When we are old we need to do more remembering, so we develop more resources to do that.

Just like a startup that puts its resources into R&D and then over time shifts over to marketing, sales, and other areas.

Aging and the Hippocampus

But:

• As we get fewer and fewer neurons dedicated to learning new information, it is harder for us to do.

• And even worse - the neurons that we have specifically wired to handle new situations now fire automatically, except they are now better at applying old methods.

Photos of Old Curmudgeons Removed

Aging and the Hippocampus

How does the design of the user experience impact short and long term decision making?

� Younger users will prefer designs that work differently than the previous one and enjoy exploring and learning the new one

� Older users will force their old techniques onto new designs and create work-arounds to make them work

Aging and the Hippocampus

What can we DO about it? Differentiation using models, settings, and/or features targeting each demographic

Motivated Reframing

Motivated Reframing

Ethical Decision Making

Identity Resonance

Thank you!!