The Apps Changing People’s Lives Have This One Thing In Common
You may not have heard of human transformation technology, but you’ve definitely felt its effects.
It’s been barely a decade since Apple and Google launched their app stores, but it’s not a stretch to say that apps have irrevocably altered the human experience.
Most apps generally claim to make people’s lives better in some way. A good chunk of them do so by elevating task automation and optimization to new heights. Almost everything we do on a daily basis— consuming news, paying the bills, ordering takeout, even managing human relationships — can be done faster and more efficiently. The pitch goes something like this: Go and live your best life, now that you can do more in less time.
While optimizing our lives is a compelling perk (though not without its issues), it’s the underlying idea of using technology to help humans reach their highest potential that has captured innovators’ imaginations. Beyond eliminating everyday inefficiencies, apps are being developed to help us achieve greater health and happiness, or gain new knowledge and skills. There are apps for keeping fit and overcoming addictions, for learning foreign languages, for taking medication on time and improving mental heath, for living more sustainably; basically, for any conceivable human undertaking.
The sheer diversity of apps is remarkable, but even more striking is how the best of them share one common feature: They all apply principles of neuroplasticity (i.e. the brain’s capacity to alter itself in response to new experiences) to drive desired behavioral changes. Simply being aware of this fact opens up a new world of possibilities in terms of harnessing technology to improve people’s lives, but more on that later. First, let’s consider how an understanding of neuropsychology — a discipline that focuses on the brain and its relationship to behavior — can figure powerfully into app design.
Different, but the same
Take the following apps, each critically acclaimed, commercially successful and boasting an impressive number of active users:
- SWEAT, a physical fitness app featuring a suite of video-led programs for women, from strength performance and yoga to post-pregnancy training and rehab;
- Headspace, the top-ranked app focused on mindfulness-based meditation;
- Duolingo, the educational app helping hundreds of millions of people learn new languages for free; and
- Peak, a brain training app that exercises cognitive skills such as memory, focus, mental agility and problem-solving.
Viewed through a neuropsychological lens, these seemingly disparate apps are in fact incredibly similar in their user experience design and how they support sustained learning or behavior change. Strip away the branding, break down the components of each app, and you’ll find their core mechanics embrace the same general principles of brain plasticity and behavior. For instance:
- Short, repetitive training sessions spaced out over time lead to better learning and retention. Compared to ‘massed training’ (ie. cramming), ‘spaced training’ elicits more of the neural changes necessary for new knowledge and skills to stick long-term. This explains the tendency to present content in bite-sized modules that are then revised at increasing intervals of time, regardless of whether the user is aiming to master self-acceptance or French vocabulary.
- Our brains are primed for rewards. All four apps employ a reward system consisting of some strategic combination of leveling, quests and badges to trigger the release of dopamine into our neural circuitry. This acts as a kind of ‘motivational currency’ that reinforces the association of a certain sequence of behaviors with a feel-good factor, and in essence rewires the brain to make things like completing a tough workout session more palatable.
- A sense of autonomy enhances intrinsic motivation (i.e. motivation to engage in a task for its own sake). The apps give users influence over their own experience—by being able to browse and search content, select the direction and pace of their own learning, and move beyond a list of pre-determined choices —because this makes them more likely to explore and engage with the subject matter over longer periods of time.
- Social acceptance and meaningful connection with others activates reward regions in the brain. Hence Headspace’s Buddy feature, SWEAT’s community, Duolingo’s leaderboards and Peak’s brain map comparisons let users cooperate, make contributions, compete, or build their reputations within a wider group. While these forms of social connection are often processed as rewards in and of themselves, they can also be important gateways to positive behavior change.
If the above principles and how they manifest themselves sound familiar, that’s because the world’s most popular social media and eCommerce platforms employ comparable techniques to hijack our neural pathways, though not always for good. Co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris calls this the “race to the bottom of the brain stem”:
“… when you pull out your phone, and they design how this works or what’s on the feed, it’s scheduling little blocks of time in our minds. If you see a notification, it schedules you to have thoughts that maybe you didn’t intend to have. If you swipe over that notification, it schedules you into spending a little bit of time getting sucked into something that maybe you didn’t intend to get sucked into.”
In other words, when a product or app is optimized purely to ensure repeat engagement, they can cause people to act contrary to their own interests. Worst case, they create compulsion loops that boost a company’s bottom line while ruining people’s ability to function healthily in society. Given the propensity to misuse and abuse technology, it’s hardly surprising that many feel the need to adopt digital minimalism, or launch crusades against ‘technology addiction’.
It’s not all dystopian doom and gloom, however.
As the four apps we’ve looked at show, there’s another more hopeful, yet intensely practical way forward: We can use the same neuropsychological insights to design tech products that prompt and sustain human well-being. This is the key driver behind the emergence of a new category of technology we call human transformation technology.
Back to brain basics
Human transformation technology is tech that positively transforms the human experience, whether in education, health, business or any other area of human development. Crucially, it does so by integrating neuropsychological research into product design so that (1) any behavioral barriers to desired changes are eliminated as far as possible, and (2) behavioral strategies conducive to those changes are built into the user experience.
Imagine someone who wants to help kids learn STEM better. Applying a human transformation technology approach refocuses the discussion from “How do I build a STEM educational app?” towards “How do I build a STEM educational app that delivers content in ways consistent with what we know about how kids — and their brains — best absorb new information?” As many studies have shown, simply loading up a classroom with new software and tablets doesn’t automatically translate into better learning outcomes.
Rather than simply create digital replicas of conventional learning resources, human transformation technology reshapes the way we interface with the advanced tools at our disposal — such as mobile, big data, AI, augmented and virtual reality — in order to improve how effectively people acquire, retain and apply knowledge. It is a fundamental approach to product design that strives to reach a happy equilibrium between technology, neuroscience, and human well-being. It also has major implications for the design and development of apps that aim to support positive behavioral and social change. Let’s now briefly explore these.
The power of fundamentals
“To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.”
— Albert Einstein
Being conscious of the fundamental mechanisms of how our brains respond to technology helps us look past the usual technical intricacies that go into app development, and hone in on the key determinant of success: An app’s impact on users’ thoughts, emotions and behaviors, and the extent to which that aligns with the desired behavioral outcome(s). It’s not that technical components aren’t important — only that without a grounded understanding of neuropsychology to direct the development process, the product will likely fail to achieve its goal, no matter how many development dollars get spent.
Additionally, the way human transformation technology breaks app design down into brain-behavior principles gives it both broad applicability and individual specificity. It serves as a powerful explanatory concept for why any app, in any area of human activity, is or isn’t supporting effective behavior change. At the same time, it can function as a useful guiding framework for the creation of niche social good apps that don’t exist yet, but probably should.
From fundamentals to democratization
Democratization of technology refers to the process by which access to technology rapidly continues to become more accessible to more people.
When a solid core of fundamental design principles emerge, it becomes possible to convert them into product platforms on top of which limitless types of solutions can be built. This is the idea driving low- and no-code platforms like Microsoft’s PowerApps and Canva, tools that make it possible for people with zero technical skills to create professional business apps and design assets. It’s the same idea behind our social good app creation platform, Cogniss.
Prior to launching Cogniss in 2016, many on our team had spent years working on groundbreaking custom digital learning solutions spanning the corporate, government, education, medical, and not-for-profit sectors. The work was as rewarding as it was frustrating — frustrating because, as is common practice in the custom development world, each solution was essentially built from scratch, making the process laborious and prohibitively expensive for all but those with big budgets.
The turning point came when we realized that the most effective solutions, regardless of the learning or behavioral challenge they were addressing, all shared the same core principles of brain plasticity— principles that could be integrated into a single product platform. And so we built Cogniss, a low-code platform that turns neuropsychologically informed design principles into ready-made templates that streamline and accelerate the process of creating human transformation technology solutions.
By creating Cogniss, we have been able to:
- dramatically lower design and development costs for social good apps;
- deliver enhanced learning and behavior change outcomes; and
- preserve the flexibility needed to adapt to the nuances of any target user group.
With the average multi-featured app typically costing between $100,000 and $500,000 or more to develop, low- and no-code platforms are helping democratize technology, putting power back into the hands of those who would normally be priced out. Given the scale and diversity of social challenges, there is great value in empowering as wide a range of people as possible — including those traditionally marginalized in technology innovation — to participate in the production of cost-effective and socially viable solutions. Platforms like Cogniss put us on a path where instead of having to grapple with high costs and complex code, people can focus on how technology is applied, for whom, and to what ends.
Looking ahead
It would be presumptuous to think we know all there is to know about brain-behavior relationships, but we do know enough to start designing technology in more human-oriented ways that improve education, health and behavioral outcomes. The rise of low- and no-code platforms serves to make this process more affordable and accessible for more people.
Rather than being an obstacle, the unknown constitutes an exciting incentive to continue exploring, testing and validating the ways technology can work in tandem with how brain plasticity affects our ability to change for the better. That said, innovators have a duty to create interventions that incorporate evidence-based practice and research. For example, we should avoid stretching the concept of neuroplasticity too far. Rather than view technology as an absolute panacea, we should treat it as one promising tool among several for helping improve people’s lives.
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Cogniss Magazine is published by Cogniss, a platform for building Human Transformation apps — apps that use applied neuroscience and psychology to drive better learning, health and behavior change outcomes.
