Table of Contents for

Designing for How People Think

Chapter 1. Rethinking “The” Experience

Great experiences

Think of a truly great experience in your life.  

Was it one of life’s milestones? The birth of a child, marriage, graduation, etc.? Or was it a specific moment in time—a concert with your favorite band, a play on Broadway, an immersive dance club, an amazing sunset by the ocean, or watching your favorite movie. 

You might remark that it was “brilliant”, or “an amazing experience!” to a friend.

What you probably didn’t think about was how many different sensations and cognitive processes blend together to make that experience for you. Could you almost smell the popcorn when you thought of that movie? Maybe the play had not only great acting but creative costumes and lighting and starred someone you had a crush on at the time. Was the concert experience exceptional because you were unexpectedly offered a free drink, then escorted to your seats, filled with glorious music, and dancing with festive fans nearby. So many elements come together to provide a “singularly” great experience. 

What if you wanted to make an experience yourself? How might you go about designing a great experience with your product or service? What are the sensations and cognitive processes that make up your experience? How can you tease it apart systematically into component parts? How will you know you are building the right thing?

This book is designed to help you understand and harness what we know about human psychology to unpack experiences into their component parts and uncover what is needed to build a great experience. This is a great time to do so. The pace of scientific discoveries in brain science has been steadily increasing. There have been tremendous breakthroughs in psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, and human-computer interaction that provide new information about distinct brain functions and how humans process that information to generate that feeling of a single experience.

How humans think about thinking (and what we don’t realize)

Your thoughts about your own thinking can be misleading.  We all have the feeling of being sentient beings (at least I hope you do, too). We know what it’s like to experience our own thoughts – what early psychologists like the Gestaltists called “introspection”.  But there are limits to your awareness of your own mental processes.

We all know what it’s like to struggle over a decision about which outfit to wear for something like a job interview: Do you meet their initial expectations? Will they get the wrong impression? Does it look good? Do you look professional enough? Do those pants still fit? Are those shoes too attention-grabbing? There are a lot of thoughts there – but there are still more thoughts that you are unable to articulate, or even be aware of.

One of the fascinating things about consciousness is that we are not aware of all of our cognition. For example, while we are easily able to identify the shoes we plan to wear to the interview, we do not have insight into how we recognized shoes as shoes, or how we were able to sense the color of the shoes. In fact, there are an amazing variety of cognitive processes that are impenetrable to introspection. We generally don’t know where our eyes are moving to next, the position of our tongue, the speed of our heart rate, how we see, how we recognize words, how we remembered our first home (or anything), to mention just a few.

There are other more advanced mental processes that are also automatic. When we think of Spring, we might automatically think of green plants, busy songbirds, or blooming flowers. Those together might give you a pleasant emotional state, too. As soon as you think of almost any concept, your brain automatically conjures any number of related ideas and emotions without conscious effort. 

This book is about measuring and unpacking an experience, and so we must identify not only consciously accessible cognitive processes, but also those that are unconscious (like eye movements often are) and deep-seated emotions related to those concepts.

Why product managers, designers and strategists need this information

No product, service, or experience will ever be a runaway success if it does not end up meeting the needs of the target audience. But beyond that we want someone who is introduced to the product or service for the first time to say something like a London-er might: “Right, that’s brilliant!” 

But how, as a corporate leader, marketer, product owner, or designer do you make certain your products or services have a great experience? You might ask someone what they want, but we know that many people don’t actually understand what they are trying to solve and often can’t clearly articulate their needs. You might work from the vantage of what you would want, but do you really know how a 13-year-old girl wants to work with Instagram? So how should you proceed? 

This book is designed to give you the tools you need to deeply understand the needs and perspective of your product or service’s audience. As a cognitive scientist, I felt like “usability testing” and “market surveys” and “empathy research” were at times both too simplistic and too complicated. These methods focus on understanding the challenge or the problem users are experiencing, but sometimes I think they miss the mark in helping you, the product team, understand what you need to do. 

I believe there is a better way: By understanding the elements of an experience (in this book we will describe six), you can better identify audience needs at different levels of explanation. Throughout  this book, I’ll help you better understand what the audience needs at those different levels and make sure you hit the mark with each one. 

When I’ve given talks on “Cognitive Design” or the “Six Minds of Experience,” corporate leaders, product owners, and designers in the room usually say something to the effect of “That is so cool! But how could I use that?” or “Do I need to be a psychologist to use this?” 

Create evidence-based and psychologically-driven products and services

This book is not designed to simply by a fun trip into the world of psychology.  Rather, it is a practical one designed to let you put what you learn into immediate practice. It is divided into three major parts. Part 1 details each of the “six minds” which together form an experience. Part 2 describes how to work with your target audience through interviews and watching their behavior to collect the right data and gather useful information for each of the Six Minds. Part 3 suggests how you can apply what you’ve learned about your audiences’ Six Minds and put it to use in your product and service designs. 

A final note the to the psychologists and cognitive scientists reading this

Bear with me.  In a practical and applied book I simply can’t get to all the nuances of the mind/brain that exist, and I need a way to communicate to a broad audience what to look for that is relevant to design.  There are a myriad of amazing facts about our minds which (sadly) I am forced to gloss over, but I do so intentionally so that we may focus on the broader notion of designing with multiple cognitive processes in mind, and ultimately allow for an evidence-based and psychologically-driven design process.  It would be an honor to have my fellow scientists work with me to integrate more of what we know about our minds into the design of products and services.  I welcome your refinements.  At the end of each chapter I will point to further citations the interested reader can pursue to get more of the science they should know.