Got smart?

Everything’s smart now. Smart phones, smart TVs, smart cars, smart watches and smart appliances help with hundreds of daily choices; some countries have even designed smart cities that significantly reduce everyday hassles for a better quality of life. Smart devices transcend race, nationality, educational achievement and even social status. You’ll even find rural entrepreneurs using smart phones now, almost like classrooms, to help in their social and economic development.

But why are smart products so ubiquitous and addictive? The answer is obvious; they’re intuitive and fun to use. They look nice, they feel nice and they seem to ‘know’ how we think. But they don’t fall from heaven looking so sexy; designers who study human behaviour make them so by studying what comes naturally when we choose. They place on our devices luscious triggers that a baby could use. It’s as easy as if you see a big, rosy, luscious ripe mango right in front your face. You will bite it before doing a calorie count. Designers do stuff like that with products; their products help us to choose by default. This is why - in technical studies - they are sometimes referred to as cognitive artefacts.

What if public health messaging and interventions could be just as smart, just as persuasive and just as irresistible for everyone? For one thing, public health would not have to spend enormous sums on awareness campaigns that contribute little to changing behaviour. Behavioural design interventions for public health can deliver society to a much better place where plenty lives and money will be saved, and people will be happier and more productive.

This is not far-fetched. In public health, some behavioural designers or ‘choice architects’ as they are sometimes called, have had quite remarkable results from creative, simple and inexpensive interventions.

Here’s a brilliant example tackling the big problem of organ and blood donation. Behavioural designers working with a blood and transplant organization decided to team up with a matchmaking app to get more people to sign on. Why? Because they know that when humans are attracted to each other they are easily influenced to ‘have what the other is having’. And humans who use matchmaking apps will look for people who share their interests. So if when I’m using the app I see a really pretty girl I’d like to meet, and looking a little further, I find that she likes some things that I do and she’s taken steps to find out about organ donation, and right then I get a prompt to make a super easy swipe to find out more about organ donation, I’d be very likely to make that one swipe. That one swipe will then take me to some more easy prompts, and before I know it, I would have signed up to learn more about donation just because I saw a girl I like.

What makes this work is the combination of two behavioural principles: salience and social norms. In short, people are drawn to things that stand out, and will choose what other people, like themselves, have chosen. The donor organization and the app group found that people would be heavily influenced to sign up, once they see how many just like them are willing to sign up, especially if they find them attractive.

This is a great illustration of what can happen when health policy makers accept that humans will choose more intuitively than robot-like.

Here are some images, taken from my kindle, of a couple books on that you might like to check out. They speak in depth about the design and psychology behind the attractiveness of smart apps.

Steve