The optimism of #Purpose & science of #design in forging #digital customer experiences! Opinions my own!

When we talk about neurological insights; my take is how swimming upstream as I call it, double downing on design and innovation, amplifies downstream results, and with greater precision.

We consumers have come to expect extraordinary (human) experiences – imagine how digital/ transient/ ephemeral things have become and yet the connection has to be made – and the last 2 (lost) years have made us even more irritable, getting ‘high’ on instant gratification. Companies are under immense pressure to create these ‘magical’ experiences as Hyken calls them – so much so in fact, NYU Prof Scott Galloway thinks we are living 10 years in the future! Meaning, the strong gets stronger, the weak are culled if not already. Even the HX ‘pros’ have upped their ant – just look at Starbucks, where it has long been understood that a cafe is much more than a place to get coffee. Starbucks Reserve locations elevate the cafe experience to a new level. Patrons watch green coffee beans being roasted and then brewed onsite, while “mixologists” host coffee tastings and prepare unique cocktails. People can shop for local artwork and gifts with drinks in hand. They can also take tours, eat dinner, and attend classes.

Of course, extraordinary customer experiences are not always upmarket. For instance, low-cost airline Avelo flies only to and from small airports that are easy to navigate. It encourages passengers to check their bags in order to speed up boarding and deplaning, and it has eliminated flight-change fees. Avelo’s focus makes affordable travel easy and comfortable — major upgrades when you consider the treatment that budget-conscious passengers usually get.

Yes, the gamut, entire spectrum of magical (above average) human experiences is wide, but there’s somewhat a quiescence: they say to err is human – but before that, even more primal, is to #Trust! Trust is the new currency of the Exponential Age, of the Experience Economy, in all it’s ‘verses, multi-verse or not, meta(verse) or not! In fact, it’s perhaps all (Trust) that’s left to define us humans – and we may yet have to (re) define it – something we are labelling regenerative leadership for now.

A single bad human experience – albeit rarish IMO as there’s elasticity, even if it’s tensile strength is all but non-existent – can drive away customers, but one that’s ‘just’ above average (studies show just +10%) originates a desire to interact, re-experience again. Remember, consistency > intensity, always. The saying goes, when we play the Infinite Game, be better today > yesterday ad infinitum. In summary, we humans, well most of us, lack the precision (or is it tenacity?) needed to consistently engineer/ orchestrate the extraordinary.

Prof Paul J. Zak and is team have identified a set of brain signals that internalises human experiences as ‘feeling’ valuable and emotionally charged, thus rendering them memorable – his work then postulates that this combination or basket of feels produce a desire to repeat the experience. Scintillating work really, read more about Prof Zak’s work here: https://tinyurl.com/mse9wnp9

Something that’s ‘natural’ for us Design Thinking and Innovation practitioners – well apparently there’s science (neuroscience) behind it! I’ve just termed it the Science of Magical Experiences (here:…) previously – but let’s dig into it.

What Happens during Immersion

Powerful emotional responses supercharge memories of experiences (what makes it ‘memorable’) – but there’s another ingredient = Trust. Entire civilisations are founded upon Trust. Love certainly is, and upon that, societies form and together, humans banded together to do the extraordinary. Well, surviving sabre-toothed tigers was extraordinary, as was sharing the know-how when fire was discovered – the list goes on. We came together, we trusted each other, i order for us do great(er) things. These memorable, magical human experiences – let’s dissect them further: try to recall, draw upon empathetic memory, how we felt when experiencing these (moments).

An emotional response is subconscious, and not nearly represented in consciously delivered user feedback e.g survey scores and ratings; think how you responded to surveys, how you had to draw upon memory, but for most of us the emotional connection has inadvertently attenuated. Indeed, such ratings have almost no predictive value for movie ticket sales, online streaming, sales bumps from advertising, or other product/service performance measures. The subjective poorly predicts the objective.

When we are asked to quantify our subconscious emotional responses, our brains do not give us access with any degree of accuracy- it seems, according to Zak’s research, unconscious neural activity cannot be made conscious no matter how hard we try – and that makes sense! So much sense. The false-negatives we look out for (weed out) in predictive models are intrinsically baked in! It’s like, without intention, objective and meaning to, we ‘lie’ – we feel we must produce an answer, response (to a stimuli) to a researcher asking a question. To add to that, decreasing the fidelity of the response (didn’t say integrity!) our responses are subject to a large set of biases, such as social norms/ acceptability, congruence with one’s self-identity, and framing effects, further detracting intended veracity.

Zak and his team posits that self-report inaccuracy, a challenge that researchers continually wrestle with, can be avoided by measuring neurologic activity. Cue: Musk’s Neuralink (and other implants). Today we wear, or are constrained to external paraphernalia helping us ‘jack in’ into the Metaverse. It won’t be long (I’d say <10 years) before our children or theirs, deem it natural (or more advantageous) to have biological implants. Mark my words, it’s going to be the new steroid of our times! I mean, if I can frag, mine, interact, play, conduct work or perform any activity IRL and in the Metaverse more efficiently – I’m going to be rewarded for it. Before long, it will be something everyone has to adopt just to ‘keep up’. But I digress – back to neurological insights. Zak’s initial research identifying neurochemical predictors of experiences received government funding to measure around 150 brain signals simultaneously, to identify neuroelectric signatures that invoke the brain out of homeostasis and compel us to ‘take action’ after experiencing a well, magical (or above average) human experience.

Immersion has two main components. The first is the binding of the neurotransmitter dopamine to receptors in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. This alerts the brain to pay attention because something that may be of value is nearby.The second component is the release of the neurochemical oxytocin from the brain stem, triggering emotional resonance with the experience one is having. Sinek puts it rather simply (and aptly): we feel good when we do good. We feel good when we help others! Now we know why! Love is a chemical reaction after all – and 100% so is Trust. A layman would just say we humans we’re all walking chemical reactions and our body test tubes. Or as Zak would put it: the electrical activity of these signals can be tracked second by second, and they provide a granular, physical measure of what consumers’ brains value and what gives people joy — the potent combination that makes magical human experiences memorable and worth repeating.

In studies that used pharmaceuticals to turn up emotional resonance in the brain and analyse its effects, my research team found that immersion influenced spending decisions. For instance, it substantially increased the number of charitable causes to which people donated and the amount of money they gave after they viewed public service advertisements.7 Additional studies showed that the administration of synthetic oxytocin increased what people would pay for products, their perceptions of brand competence, and their use of emotional language when describing brands.8

When orchestrated, staged, engineered human experiences lack depth or emotional resonance, our attentive brains don’t value what is happening because the neurological “tagging” or Neuralink (haha..I couldn’t resist) is non-existent. Essentially, physiologic arousal goes unchecked without the calming effect of oxytocin. This is a neurologic state I term frustration. Identifying immersion and frustration points – as a new layer of depth how we colour pain-points in service/ experience journeys can help brands create extraordinary human experiences and preemptively eradicate unsatisfying ones.

Design Thinking + Neuroscience

It’s second nature to us, but we often use design-thinking (actually – I prefer 1st design) principles to understand/ empathise and ultimately (continuously) improve human experiences; for the latter I prefer to use Jobs Theory and it’s variant Outcome Driven Innovation (ODI) as it cuts through the chase and noise. Yes, there’s so much noise going on these days – the saying goes: if we know where we are going (North Star) that gives us flexibility on how we get/ navigate there (and there will be plenty of ‘noise’ in between, in that journey).

Essentially, design thinking attempts to innovate (by amplifying the quantification) of the human emotional response but as discussed above, our emotions are inaccurately represented by our conscious brain. The perception/ empathy gap is telling; thus it follows that combining neuroscience and design thinking might allow us to bridge the gap between what people report and what they feel. Plugging this empathy ‘gap’ has many benefits: businesses empathise with customers more effectively, define problems to solve with new products or services, and prototype and test their solutions. No direct brain measurement is needed to apply the underlying ideas, although measuring immersion can help companies accelerate and refine the practice of creating the extraordinary.

Here, we’ll look at how all this can play out in three key steps of the design-thinking process.

Empathise. Design thinking starts with observing and interviewing people who are using an existing product or service or for whom no good solution exists. The goal is to empathize with customers to better understand their needs.

Neuroscience research shows that you will get a better result if you take steps to ensure that participants feel psychologically safe before they are observed. In the absence of psychological safety, norepinephrine, one of the brain’s arousal neurotransmitters, inhibits the release of oxytocin, a key source of emotional resonance during an experience. This thwarts people’s ability to immerse themselves in an experience and give observers useful feedback. Consumer insights teams often hurry participants into study mode in the name of efficiency, not realizing that they are degrading the quality of the information they acquire. Rather than rushing participants into observation or discussion, give them a chance to relax. Putting them in a familiar setting increases psychological safety, as does offering them a snack. Provide time for a bio break if you spend more than one hour with them to ensure that they remain comfortable. Making people feel safe is itself an act of empathy.

Research also shows that consumer ethnographers who are highly empathic more effectively elicit emotional responses.10 Hire interviewers who have this personality trait to get the most from customer interviews. In addition, interviewers should adopt an empathic style by asking open-ended questions to elicit emotionally revealing words rather than asking participants to do the impossible: rate their feelings on a meaningless numerical scale. Active listening allows one to explore aspects of an experience that cause pain and pleasure and encourages storytelling, the default style people use to describe experiences.

Here’s an example to illustrate this: A midsized casino in southern Nevada that was planning to expand invited and incentivized a diverse set of customers to enjoy the facility while consumer ethnographers shadowed them to understand patron experiences. Before entering the building, each individual or couple was seated on a couch in a comfortable anteroom and offered soft drinks and snacks while the ethnographers introduced themselves by name and described the study. This put people at ease. Then participants were handed $50 and invited to explore the casino any way they wanted, giving them a sense of control during the observation and further enhancing psychological safety. Participants’ impressions were solicited, and as they explored gaming locations and restaurants, neurologic immersion was tracked with app-enabled smartwatches.12

After an hour in the casino, participants returned to the anteroom, where they could use the restroom and have more snacks and drinks. Only then did the ethnographers query them about what they would value in a new casino. The neurologic data and interviews revealed significant frustration when obstructions slowed progress as people tried walking toward gaming tables. Customers also had difficulty finding restaurants when they left the gaming areas, and older participants struggled to read menus. The most immersive parts of the experience were the interactions with dealers and servers. These insights informed subsequent stages of the design-thinking process and were incorporated into the expanded casino’s layout and employee training.

Define. The next step, defining the problem to be solved, involves identifying sources of frustration and deciding which ones to address. Frustration manifests neurologically as a stress response, producing physical indicators such as feet-shifting, head-scratching, and curt responses to questions. Product-use frustration can be seen in the repetition of steps to get a device to work or clumsy fumbling with buttons or knobs.

Tolerance for frustration varies substantially across individuals and contexts, so it’s important that researchers control for differences when analyzing pain points. Then designers can rank customer pains to identify the core problems to solve. Neurologic measurement allows for greater precision, but the physical indicators of frustration also provide valuable information.

A major pain-point of frustration inundating many human experiences (and these are contained within episodes in lifejourneys) — such as buying groceries, renewing a driver’s license, applying for a loan, buying a house/ car, or even spending time at a crowded amusement park — is waiting in line. We need a more robust approach to solving these pain-points (or building out these so called HX improvement opportunities). Take for example, Walt Disney Imagineering, which designs the Disney theme parks, builds a variety of mock-ups, from storyboards to scale models to virtual reality simulations, so that Experience/ Service Designers (to know how to discern between these two roles: xxx) can search for frustration/pain-points and reduce or proactively e.g. using predictive and preemptive AI, prevent them. This is how Disney discovered that having guests snake into an attraction decreased the feet-shifting associated with standing still and that posting signs with wait times decreased stress responses associated with uncertainty, like finger tapping. The Disney team also discovered that they could prevent frustration by eliminating obstacles to traffic flow between attractions. For example, they smoothed out choke points by reducing the size of planters people needed to walk around.

Zak’s team tested Disney Imagineering’s attention to detail in park design by collecting neurologic data at Disneyland from visitors outfitted with smartwatches to measure immersion and frustration. The data showed that periods of neurologic frustration in lines were surprisingly rare. Attraction entrances are richly designed, giving visitors’ brains puzzles to solve. A full day’s worth of data showed that half the time, entering a ride was more immersive than the ride itself!

What’s more – these magical human experiences whether at Disneyland or elsewhere – they’re contagious! Specifically immersion is contagious — and pain points are diminished — when groups of people share an experience. Watching someone discover an “Easter egg” while entering the Indiana Jones Adventure at Disneyland provides enjoyment and excitement to others, reducing the frustration of a long wait.

Prototype and test. It’s essential to prototype ideas and give them a small-scale trial run before committing to production — and to continue testing and improving them after they enter the market. Conducting surveys and focus groups to gauge which prototypes and products people like the most is a flawed approach for several reasons. For starters, iterative design changes are typically only unconsciously perceived, so it is difficult for people to assess them during interviews or through ratings. Even if you explicitly highlight changes for people to rate, the ratings are still unanchored (that is, no two customers’ “10 out of 10s” or “likes” are the same) and are largely unpredictive. When prototyping and testing more innovative or unusual experiences, you’ll run into a different obstacle: People lack a reference point when trying to describe whether and, especially, why they like or dislike the offering.

Determining whether customers will buy a product requires data on the emotional value people derive from it; it is emotions that drive purchase decisions. As discussed above, the brain hides emotional responses from conscious awareness. As a result, intentions to purchase in the future poorly predict actual purchases of new products. One way to ground predictions in observation is to see how long testers engage with the prototype or product. When I ran tests for a new virtual reality product, time of use increased along with the number of positive emotional words people used to describe the experience. And measuring neural responses gave us time-linked objective data on immersion or frustration that were paired with videos of the prototype in use. Another observable measure is how many early testers ask to buy prototypes.

Having your customers, the public, co-design, curate their own experiences is immensely powerful – HX practitioners call this service/ experience design. Three are endless examples, e.g. Westfield Labs, the retailer, and global appliance maker Electrolux in Stockholm (that built their lab to look/ feel like a kitchen in a typical home but has 15 hidden cameras that capture how consumers use prototype appliances). This is nothing new – I’ve had clients in concealed rooms typically an annex in their labs; much like those (gulps) police interrogation rooms; these clients observe how potential consumers (across defined segments) –not only how they interact with MVPs and prototypes placed as interventions throughout a sub-journey, episode or journey. The common, typical ones that come to mind e.g. “.. I buy”, “.. i use”, or “..i pay” just name a few. The richness of the data collected during these sessions are invaluable – brands also query participants for usage insights as they try new gadgets. Some tests include the collection of neural data via smartwatches that enables emotional responses to be tracked in real time. For example, neural signals can distinguish peak immersion moments that produce joy from moments of frustration when a participant is spending more time than expected adjusting the controls on a dishwasher. Real-time neural data can also inform the questions consumer insights team members ask. Whether or not direct neural measurement is included, members of the insights team ask open-ended questions about what consumers are experiencing as they try new products, track the time spent getting each appliance to start, and take note of any physical indicators of emotional responses. The new-product team then reviews videos of the lab experiences to determine whether a prototype is ready to go to market or needs more work.

As customers in the marketplace use a product or service, behavioral feedback (such as adoption rates and usage times) can reflect immersion and identify the next set of feature improvements. Even without direct measurement of dopamine and oxytocin, examining the behavior of “superfans” can reveal whether this important, extremely enthusiastic group of customers is delighted or frustrated.

Natural language processing (NLP) provides additional insights by quantifying +ve/-ve emotional words/ phrases in posts — we’ve all heard of text mining and sentiment analysis. The ratio of +ve/-ve emotional words/ phrases is a metric that can be tracked along with sales, marketing, customer service to assess whether a brand should continue to refine a product/ service or feature or retire/ enhance/ let it go into obsolescence. The idea is, if these ‘superfans’ or true advocates of ours do give +ve/-ve feedback – we should prioritise commensurate efforts DevOps for prod/svc improvement or elimination, since typical users within the bell-curve will have much less tolerance for frustration.

I’ve also seen brands, orgs invite these superfans to participate more directly in the product development process, cocreating extraordinary human experiences for themselves. For example, a mobile gaming company engaged its superfans to iterate on character assets for a new game release. After inviting them to participate in beta testing, the company used social media posts and direct immersion measurement to segment superfans based on their favorite characters. They were then microtargeted: Beta testers received a “share” link that included a cartoon rendering of themselves as their game character. The message asked them to replace their social media picture with the cartoon and to tell the world why their character was best. Characters and game play were then tweaked accordingly before the broad release of the game. This deep engagement of superfans enabled the company to improve its product and boost game adoption during its wide release.

Product and consumer experience teams are increasingly using neural insights to determine what consumers really value, what brings them joy, and what reduces or eliminates their pain and frustration. The payoff? Smart product design that provides extraordinary experiences, boosting customer loyalty and profitability. As technologies and devices continue to shrink in cost and size, more businesses can move away from consciously filtered self-reports and embrace brain-based measurement in their quest to innovate and better serve customers.