Presented at NYTech on June 6, 2012

1. 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

2. Why Do We Think The Way We Do?

3. Somatic Markers
Which one gives us the best gut reaction?
Competition Food Safety Danger!!!

4. Is This Your Broker?

5. 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

6. 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

7. What Is Brain Science?
Functional Anatomy

8. What Is Brain Science?
Neuro Physiology

9. What Is Brain Science?
Affective Cognition

10. What Is Brain Science?
Cognitive Neuroscience

11. 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

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. 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

17. 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

18. Aging and the Hippocampus
What can we DO about it? Differentiation using models, settings,
and/or features targeting each demographic

19. Motivated Reframing

20. Motivated Reframing

21. Ethical Decision Making

22. Identity Resonance

23. Thank you!!