Innovation Science

Brain Games

Playing games to improve one’s mental capabilities is becoming an increasingly popular pastime. Research has shown that doing crossword puzzles regularly can help counteract Alzheimer’s. I suspect that part of the popularity of Sudoku is the assumption that daily mental exercises is probably a good thing.

Nintendo games that are intended to exercise gray matter have become popular among adults in Japan. Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training game for the Nintendo DS handheld platform has sold nearly 2 million copies in Japan over the past year and has received attention by the BBC and the most recent podcast of CNet’s This Week in Technology (TWiT). Apparently the game has just been released in the US, so don’t be surprised if you start seeing adults playing with Nintendos on your next flight instead of watching Big Momma’s House II—the commentators on TWiT say that the Brain Training is fairly addictive. One of the tasks in the game is a classic cognitive task: identify the color of a word when the word spells a competing color, e.g., the word “green” appears on screen in the color orange and you have to answer "orange" and not "green". The person playing has to speak the color of the letters (not what is spelled) into the Nintendo microphone for scoring.

This idea of of intelligence-preserving software exercises has made headway outside of the game world. NeuroTone, a startup in the Bay Area founded by the people who started the dot-com-era digital audio company Liquid Audio, has developed a similar type of “brain training” system for new users of hearing aids. Most hearing aid wearers are older and have been listening for years to deteriorated speech through their impaired auditory system. They haven’t heard sounds normally for a long time and their neural plasticity has probably readjusted to respond to distorted sounds. When a hearing aid is first worn, the brain likely needs some training to readjust to the reception of normal sounds again.

Neurotone’s software, LACE, contains speech understanding tasks and cognitive tasks that help with such functions as memory. It runs on the person’s own PC and connects to their audiologist through the internet so that their audiologist can monitor their progress. LACE also adapts to the ability of the hearing aid wearer: as the person does better, the tasks become harder so that the person is always challenged. Given the interest in keeping one’s mental ability “fit”, I wouldn’t be surprised if LACE becomes popular with normally-hearing people as adults look for ways to develop their own “brain training” regimen.

One interesting aspect of LACE from a hearing aid company’s perspective is that not only is LACE innovative as a product in itself, but it proposes an innovative business model for companies that integrate LACE with their products. The software training program provides a connection between the audiologist or hearing aid company with the hearing aid wearer long after the time of purchase. It makes wearers excited about using their aids—actually looking forward each day to the “brain training” exercises that help them better use their aids.

Imagine if other products could create that kind of connection and dedication from their users. People don’t read manuals, and if they do they have usually become an annoyed customer. Imagine if you could teach your customers how to optimally use your product with an interactive game. Or turn a moderately satisfied customer into a passionate user. Creating that kind of dedication towards one’s product is something that most companies don’t even try to imagine, but here’s a system that allows users to get excited about becoming better users of a product, and obtaining improved benefit from the product as well.

With LACE, some audiologists are actually setting up PCs in their lobby so that patients who don’t have PCs at home can come in every day and obtain their mental exercises. In the consumer product field, who wouldn’t want to give their customers a reason to return to the point of purchase? Of course, audiologists are providing LACE as a part of a best-practices approach to providing benefit to their patient. In other product areas, however, the LACE business model is an example of how to  better engage with one's customers. People should be searching for similar ways to get their customers excited about learning and becoming better users of their products.

How can the “brain training” model work for your customers and inspire them to improve the benefit they receive from your product?

(Full disclosure: I’m friends with the founders of Neurotone and the renowned audiologist who developed the tests. My company gives away licenses to LACE with every one of our high-end hearing aids. These do not alter the fact that this approach to customer satisfaction is an innovation that can be adapted to other industries.)

Expectations and Customer Satisfaction

The launch of Google Calendar two weeks ago was greeted with well deserved acclaim, but some of it sounded a little like idolatry to me. On the first day of its release, one blogger praised its stability relative to other online calendars. Statements about stability of software with less than one day of use seems odd but not surprising given the high expectations that people have towards Google these days.

Expectations can have a profound effect towards biasing the opinions of a customer. This has been demonstrated scientifically many times in many fields of study.

In my field of expertise, the phenomenon of expectation affecting customer satisfaction was made starkly clear in the following experiment at the University of Iowa. Hearing impaired patients were told that they would be wearing two different hearing aids: for one month they would wear a pair with old analog technology and for another month they would wear a pair with new digital technology. In fact, both pairs of hearing aids were the same—there was no difference in technology between the two pairs worn for one month each. After trying both sets of identical aids, patients overwhelmingly reported a strong preference for the aids they had been told had new digital technology. They commented to the effect that, “Everything sounded so much clearer with the digital aids,” and,”My wife says that I understand her much better with these new aids.” Remember that there was no difference between the pairs of aids and subjects should have had no preference for one over the other—the only difference was in the subjects’ expectations.

We experience this impact of expectation on our assessments throughout our normal lives. If the political candidate that you favor stumbles in a debate, well then they simply were human and can be excused for a slight slip-up. If the candidate that you hate stumbles, however, then they have just demonstrated once again that their incompetence makes them unfit for office.

This is a confound that my departments have had to address whenever testing improvements to products: how to ensure that test subjects aren’t preferring the new product simply because they know that it is newer and therefore presumably better than previous technology. Any company that tests products needs to be aware of this potential contamination to their product testing.

A feedback effect can also occur in these situations when the product being assessed is human performance, where expectations not only affect the subjective judgments of the assessor but also affect the performance of who is being judged. This was demonstrated in the Pygmalion in the Classroom study.

In 1966, researchers investigated the expectation phenomenon by giving a meaningless test called “The Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition” to young students and then telling their school that some students scored exceptionally high which indicated that they will excel over the next few years at school. One year later, the researchers found that the students who were marked as exceptional did, in fact, do exceptionally well, with higher IQ test scores than the others and better subjective assessments by their teachers. Keep in mind that the students designated as exceptional were selected randomly with no relation to the students’ actual abilities. Most likely what happened was that the teachers treated students differently based on their expectations, and the teachers assessed the quality of those students’ work differently also based on those expectations. I’ve read nothing about the moral regret of these researchers towards the students who received less attention from their teachers because they were not anointed by the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition. Be wary of such high-falootin’ tests being used in your workplace and their impact on your bosses assessment of your ability.

These studies and others suggest that a company’s reputation affects customer satisfaction with their products—consumers often don’t judge technology on its own merits. Much has been written about the halo affect of the iPod on the rest of Apple’s product line, and about Apple’s dominant market share in portable music players despite excellent products from their competitors. The new dual-boot Macs are going to convert a lot of Windows-only users simply because their expectation of a better experience using Windows on the Apple platform, whether it is true or not.

Finally, any company who has a product that finds it competing against a new Google offering—or against a product from any company with the golden reputation of Google right now—has got to be worried even if they know that they have a better product. A bad reputation is difficult to get rid of and a great reputation is difficult to compete against. Note that this is different from when startups used to fear Microsoft entering their product space: they weren’t worried about a better product from Microsoft, just that Microsoft’s business tactics would strangle them.