is there a neurological recipe for success? #neurocx

#neurocx #BETHESTORYWednesday, March 26, 14

On the 9th March 2014 at 11:15 @ SXSW 2014 I gave the following presentation on my theory of #NeuroCX.

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;http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B00HJ4A43S - Nir 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; http://websofinfluence.com

Stephen Genco who wrote this; http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/1118518586/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1395342193&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX110_SY165 - he gave me counsel for purely altruistic reasons and helped move my thinking forward. Any of his work is worth looking at for inspiration.

#neurocx #BETHESTORY

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Wednesday, March 26, 14

My name is Pete and I work at SapientNitro in London.

On a good day we try and make the internet better, on a bad day we make it suck a little bit less.

I wanted to do this short presentation at SXSW because it was something that genuinely changed the way I do design and also the way I consume design.

This is kind of one of those hot topics at the moment...

The manipulation of the masses...

The cigarette of this century.

The press warning us of digitals addictive and potentially destructive side-effects.

I'm not going to really get into any of that with this presentation, it's another story for another day.

What I do want to talk about is how we might be able to create new habits in from our products, rather than just create bits of wallpaper, digital advertising & ‘yet another app’ or ‘campaign’.

Those days are behind us friends. The new wave of natives need us to include them in the story, not fire advertising and infomercials at them dressed up as “experiences”.

Day I say it, even NeuroMarketing might have had it’s day. NeuroCX is where the world is heading.


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ard attention...

...do not demand it

.Wednesday, March 26, 14

In 2012 I started working with the Behavioral Finance Team at one of the UKs biggest banks on a project that we nicknamed <Money Smart>.

What we wanted to do was see if we could create experiences that would change a consumers behavior;

-‐ break bad habits-‐ encourage good ones-‐ And possibly even create whole new ones

We know there are triggers in the brain that can be influenced to modify a persons deep engrained behavioral biases and possibly even change how oKen and how aLached they became to a service, app, game, tool or product but could we influence them?

We didn't want to create something creepy or FarmVille like, but we did want to see if we could reward a:en;on rather than demand it... And by doing so create a deeper connecRon with the customer by making them feel like they'd really got beLer at something and progressed.

The other reason I was taken by this project in parRcular was because of our company mantra about being renowned for changing the way brands connect to their consumers…

I love that statement

but what does it ACTUALLY mean… HOW can we change those connecRons???

What I learnt on this liLle adventure was preLy neat & Im going to quickly share some of the experience principles today and hopefully open your eyes to HOW we can start to create experiences that might be able to change the way brands connect with their consumers.


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How do you 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 money.

And it turns out that the intuitive part of your mind is a lot more powerful than you 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 take our technology with them to bed now too - When they wake up they check their notifications, tweets, and updates before they've even said good morning to their loved ones in a lot of cases.

HOW MANY OF YOU HERE HAVE ACTUALLY LOOKED AT YOUR TWEETS BEFORE YOU’VE SAID GOOD MORNING TO YOUR LOVED ONE LYING NEXT TO YOU?

What I wanted to know, was can we actually start to CREATE habits?

...and I do believe the answer is yes & it's not even that complicated.

But before I give my three tips on how to do it, I'm just going to give you a quick, very crude lesson about the Human Brain...

Now, I am neither a neurologist or a scientist or a psychologist, so that I think that absolutely qualifies me to do a NeuroScience breakdown at this point... So bear with me!


We know 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 (or paleomammalian brain), which is where, learned behavior, emotions, memories and more importantly where we think habits are formed.

Think about it like this - Information vs. Knowledge vs. Experiences.

It's that Limbic part where all the really neat stuff seems to be happening.


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So you ask 20 neuroscientists about this and you'll get 20 different answers.

I'm basing my rules today around the best research we found about how some this stuff supposedly works.

However - The best thing to do is just consider my use of the word “dopamine” as a metaphor for Happiness & Joy.

I love a good neurotransmitter me... Love them... And 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 to 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.

Just look at the success of social games like FarmVille & Candy Crush.

It's how positive experiences remain engrained with an individual.

We are literally genetically programmed to remember things and if we really like them we repeat them over and over until they become a habit.


So what are the principles we identified for stimulating those magic dopamine bombs to go off?

There are 3 core ones;

- 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 my experience principles.

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Rule 1

(Expanding scenarios linked to sustained progress and instant gratification)

Giving people incentives and information is not necessarily enough.

They need 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 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.

However, what we also discovered is that in task based rewards, the new learned behavior also leads to extraverted behavior

Producing positive emotions and feelings of desire that motivate us to work toward obtaining those rewards even more.

You literally want to continue to do it and repeat it again.

What also became very clear to us, is that when we're encouraged to participate in highly structured, self-motivated hard work, we regularly achieve the greatest form of happiness available to human beings - Satisfaction.

The feeling that you're getting better at something.

The main trick to 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 nailed it 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.

Research shows that dopamine surges when the brain is expecting a reward too, not just earning it.

So introducing variability multiples that effect.

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#BETHESTORY

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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.

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?

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;

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...

Make sure you bake in viral loops and enough opportunities for a consumer to share, give feedback to each other and do good things.

Joy

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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.

Thats easy to think about... 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.


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E X U SWednesday, March 26, 14

So heres the crucial point - These principles I’ve just gone through aren’t new.

In fact they're as old as the hills in digital terms, but its the NEXUS of these three things combined that creates genuine habits and wholesale behavioral change.

The proof of it is all around us.

Independently they have weight and substance, combined they become something very potent and very powerful.


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Milestone UnlockReal-time ControlChain CombosInstant Feedback

FriendingSocial GiftingBraggingThank-you Economy

Mini-QuestEaster EggsRandom RewardRolling Reward

AppointmentsFixed Intervals

Prize PacingCount Down

CollectionsLearning Curve

MonitoringProfile Building

Points & BadgesFixed Action Rewards

Progress BarLevel-Up

Narrative

Elitism

Humanity Hero

Higher Meaning

Progress Loss

Evanescence

F.O.M.O

Downgrading

BRAND Y

BRAND X


It’s all about Badges and Tweeting, right?

Wrong - I clock it at about 32 opportunities for ‘give joygasms’ and ‘gain Kudos’ to get those dopamine bombs dropping.

Yukai Chou, the Gamification calls it “Octalysis”. 8 opportunities to delight.

However - It’s really important that we get the basics in each of those moment right too. There are three elements that must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: motivation, ability, and trigger.

So in a nutshell our digital experiences must:

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.

The structure is all about timing – if all components don’t fire simultaneously then the player will lose interest or become frustrated. Here are some principles you can build into our website and apps.

• Rewards. A reward is something you receive and feel positive about. The feeling positive part is the key ingredient. Consumers should be rewarded with virtual goods (e.g., points) for specific behavior (e.g., purchase, filling out a form), and those virtual items should offer access to exclusive privileges and rewards, such as levels or prizes.

• Loss Aversion. 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 Zynga’s Farmville, you get a starter farm. If you don’t visit the farm and care for your crops, they wither and die.

• 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 are a good idea. Also, making achievements social encourages people to continually one-up, and stay motivated to reach clear goals. To learn more about designing reputation systems, check out this presentation.

• Feedback. Feedback tells users that their intended action was registered, and shows the outcomes of that action. Seeing points accumulate as actions are taken establishes a clear and instant reward system. It’s also an immediate indication that the user is getting closer to their goal. Continually accomplishing small goals in order to reach a larger goal is often what makes games addictive.


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

With all the rhetoric in the press at the moment about the morality of this supposed brain influence, what I want to say to you is this: Is Weight Watchers wrong? One of the most successful mass-behavioral change products in history? Think about it.


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In Abraham Maslows, The Psychology of Science, he says;

“I suppose it is tempRng, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail”

Similarly, Abraham Kaplan, states in his book The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science;

“The law of the instrument, may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding”

They’re basically making the same point... Which is that we’re prone to thinking about things in the same way that we always have. As creators of experiences we go straight to our own cogniRve bias of “Designing Stuff”.

When in fact, for a brand to success in the new world -‐ a world almost constantly tapping in and out of The Reward Centre -‐ it’s Rme to look at our brand engagements as a series of opportuniRes to delight, rather than a desRnaRon for a customer to go to and engage with.

How about this as a thought... What if we created 365 (or even 52 to be less effort on our part!) liLle experiences for our customers, pivoRng around the same “Organizing Idea” and story, giving them the opportunity to get beLer and brag in every one. It’s perhaps the newest way of looking at digital.

Reward aLenRon... Don’t demand it.


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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 look at text books or academia. Don’t reach for Google for the answers... You already have them 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

Have fun & stay curious.

Thank you


#BEENTHESTORY,(you next?)


is there a neurological recipe for success? #neurocx

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