Some Behavioural Design Principles

We expect the following behavioural design principles to become commonplace as human augmentation takes hold.

1. Designing for cognitive biases:

Behavioural Economics will inform successful design for human augmentation technologies. Designers may need to include design elements that provide choice and user control, for example. Marketers could frame these designs by emphasizing what users lose by failing to adopt new technologies (leveraging the bias of loss aversion). Similarly, they could incorporate messaging on adoption rates by others in the community to encourage uptake ( social norms).

2. Differentiating for social contexts:

Since users endow anthropomorphic products with human-like attributes, these products exist in specific social contexts. Developers will need to design differently for each context. For instance, users might prefer that homecare robots assisting them with bathing be less lifelike than those helping them with financial planning; Users in China view privacy and control differently from those in Europe; and different generations will bring different levels of acceptance to their adoption of new technologies.

3. Learning based on the stages of adoption:

Since human augmentation technologies are a new space, companies will continuously adapt designs and incorporate the lessons they learn. Indeed, user biases themselves will change at different stages of the adoption curve. Fears of technology and the need for human control could dissipate with time; designs will adapt. On the other hand, other cognitive biases will become more important with time. One example is automation bias, which is the tendency to rely excessively on automation over human judgment.