5 Lessons From Biology That Predict Successful UX & Products Of The Future
How our fundamental biology, ancient social dynamics and evolutionary paths provide a crystal ball for how we adopt and use technology both today and tomorrow.
How do we design for an ambiguous future?
“The things I’d be working with haven’t been invented yet.” This was the answer my then 10-year-old son gave when asked by one of my friends what he wanted to do when he grew up. Recognizing that most of what we’ll be working on in the near future hasn’t been invented is both humbling and a little scary.
We’re expected to be designing for a future where the things that we’re going to be working on haven’t been created yet.
We’re all in this boat. Drifting on an ocean of ambiguity. Nobody can see the future of product design with any certainty. Consider that 10 years ago the iPhone didn’t exist, self driving cars were subject matter for cartoons, AI was confined to lab experiments and, voice interfaces were mostly fictitious characters on sci-fi shows.
Is there anything we know about the future of products?
I get asked this question a lot. But the question makes no sense. There are too many variables and too many product categories. The right question is, what do we know about the humans today and how will that help us design relevant products tomorrow?
Here’s what we know will be consistent:
- Social dynamics will drive most of our behavior: From a human behavior perspective we are consistently influenced by social interactions. The desire to be part of a social group and those connections are deeply entrenched in our physiology. A need for security and certainty in social circles will remain. As a species, it’s these highly adapted social skills that has got us this far.
- Brain physiology prioritizes emotional responses: The structure of our brains hasn’t changed significantly in the last 100,000 years. Although we have a very large Neocortex, our relatively smaller, and some might say, primitive Amygdala and Hippocampus still drive most of our behavior. Emotions help us connect the dots between what happens in our environment and how we figure out what to do when we encounter those things. Most UI/UX interactions are driven by this fact.
- Habits are biology’s flywheel: Habits are a powerful driver of product adoption and their continued usage. Most product’s require us to either learn new behavior or they take advantage of existing habits. Depending on your perspective, this can be either good or bad. I happen to think it’s good. As Jason Hreha, Head of Product, Behavioral Sciences at Walmart says, “Inertia is our friend. Habits are the drivers of inertia. They allow us to continue cruising in the same direction we’ve been going.”
Let’s take a deeper dive into what biology can teach us about product design and how that can help your product team.
Biology is an Exquisite Designer
The systems and environmental factors that drive biological design are ruthless but extremely effective. Only nature’s best product designs survive.
We might think of the biological design system being random and opportunistic but on inspection the it’s not. Biology has guiderails just like any other system. These will look familiar to any product designer or engineer:
- Biology loves constraints. Working within the guidelines of physics and chemistry, the system refines it’s product. As in all inventive endeavors, constraints appear to help, not detract, from creativity.
- Biology loves beauty. Somewhat counterintuitively, beautiful aesthetics are an output of good design, not an input. “When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” R. Buckminster Fuller.
- Biology loves adaptability. Nature is always adjusting and adapting to environmental changes. Organisms that can’t adapt reasonably quickly will become extinct.
- Biology loves harmony. Balance and homeostasis. It might come as a surprise to some but there is a far greater percentage of harmonious and symbiotic relationships in nature than predatory or parasitic examples.
- Biology loves a good user test. Biology is a ruthless, massive, parallel experimenter. Iteration and experimentation is a core feature of biological design.
Biological design is a cycle of near wins that lead to more attempts. Sound familiar?
As product people we’re constantly going through that cycle. Our work is never really finished. Improvements are never done.
Design Lesson from Biology #1: Product Innovation Is Evolutionary, But Not The Way You Think
Getting ahead of the adaptation curve and driving change is a requirement of success. Being comfortable with adaptation is just another way to say you embrace change. By using an evolutionary approach to designing products means thinking you can be part of change you want to create. Or as Mahatma Gandhi said, “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
It’s also important to understand that evolution’s path is bumpy and not smooth. Charles Darwin suggested that evolution was a slow and gradual process but he never said that the pace of change was constant. Current evidence suggests a ‘stepped’ pattern, which looks a lot like the product innovation space.
In the early 70’s Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge proposed an explanation, which they called “punctuated equilibrium.” The idea is that species don’t change much for long periods but then this leisurely pace is “punctuated” by a rapid burst of change that results in a new species (see diagram below).
The horizontal lines on the right hand diagram speak to the sudden and dramatic periods of change. Between those bands nothing really changes because nothing needs to change. When environmental pressures arrive, sometimes without warning, the demand for change spikes. Adaptation happens under stress.
But even this model isn’t the complete picture. In spite of my crude evolutionary diagrams above, neither biological nor technological, changes don’t happen in a upward or linear fashion.
Above is more accurate chart of the natural evolution of species is a disk radiating outward. Evolution doesn’t happen in a single linear branching pattern. It can be a messy spread of features and innovations that happen in response to a multitude of inside and outside forces. Solutions to stress can evolve in any direction. This is beautifully illustrated (above) by evolutionary biologist David Hillis.
How to Apply This Lesson To Your Work
As in nature, product design/dev adaptation often happens only when big change happens or negative feedback is received. This negative feedback is the equivalent of evolution’s environmental pressures. Organizations need to step ahead of these moments of panic by creating opportunities to learn what they don’t know
Don’t sit around waiting for the inevitable environmental stress. Seek it out, or better yet, create it yourself.
Build a product team that’s actively seeking new, and potentially harmful, insights. Solicit negative feedback before you discover it accidentally on social media. Make this a habit. When we expose ourselves to potential bad news and negative customer feedback, we get a better product.
Design Lesson from Biology #2: Mobile Is A Human State, Not a Technology
I feel like this can’t be repeated enough:
Mobile is not a technology, it’s our natural human state.
Mobility is one of the primary things that influenced brain size. It wasn’t the need for making tools, or rational thinking that drove initial brain growth*, it was movement. Organisms that move need brains.
“Movement is the only thing you have to effect the world around you.” says neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert. His research suggests that the brain initially evolved, not to think or feel, but to control movement.
Wolpert provides a good example of how movement determines whether brains are needed — the humble Sea Squirt. While it swims through the ocean the Sea Squirt uses it’s brain but as soon as the squirt settles on a coral reef it starts to digest its own brain.
When new tech is invented, it starts out being big and clunky. As it evolves that same tech gets smaller and smaller. Why? Because it needs to be smaller so that we can carry it around with us.
The biology of movement and the mobility of tech tell us a story about who we are and where we are headed. We are the thing that is mobile. Technology is only attempting to fit into our mobility. That’s the reality product people need to design and build for.
*Note: Movement may have been the reason organisms developed early, albeit simple, brains but it was socialization and managing complex relationships that drove our big neocortex.
How to Apply This Lesson To Your Work
Whatever kind of tech or modality you’re working on, it’s always moving towards more mobility. This does not translate to assuming every design project is mobile first. Mobile first is a design concept imagined to push designers towards thinking about mobile modalities. However, this does mean you should begin every project mobile first. Convergence with our primary human state is the goal, not blindly following the herd with the latest design or dev fashion.
Mobile is not a fashionable trend. It’s our natural state. Don’t build ‘mobile-first’, build for ‘mobile forever’.
Additionally, humans move so much that they influence the very structure of the world around them. This feedback loop will in turn influence how we shape the world and build products for the future. As Winston Churchill said of architecture, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” The same could be said for products like smartphones and cars.
Design Lesson from Biology #3: Adaptations Often Feel Like Superpowers
Our favorite products often feel like they are amplifying our common or garden biological powers. For example, hailing a ride-share taxi from across town with a quick touch of your phone feels magical. Peering through a screen to chat with a friend in another country can feel like time-space travel. Taken at face value, these products are really just an extension of our voices, eyes, ears and touch senses.
Our anatomy and physiology hasn’t changed much in the last 100,000 years and there’s a pretty good chance they won’t change in the next 1000 years. That doesn’t mean we won’t find amplifiers for our current biology — like robotics or AI. My opinion is that these technologies won’t immediately replace our biological capabilities. Rather they will augment and amplify our existing powers. I generally agree with Kevin Kelly that the rise of entirely artificial intelligence is somewhat hyperbolic but I think we should expect that human intelligence lies somewhere unremarkable on the line of possible intelligence, not at the extreme high end. My prediction is that robotics and AI will work best when developed in conjunction with our current biology.
As this tech reaches commercial products, the most likely outcomes will be enhancements and amplifications of our human capabilities and senses. Whether these are extreme, or subtle, humans will take time to absorb these tech advances into our lives.
Surprisingly, this integration won’t be for purely productivity or skill enhancement reasons. Mostly, the merger of human and tech will be a social adaptation. Just because you have the ability to add a new technology, doesn’t mean it’ll be attractive to humans. A good example of this is the failure of Google Glass. It made the wearers feel self-conscious or silly and, in some cases, unsafe. Great tech needs to make us feel better, not worse.
Over time, adding something like RFID chips under the skin or bionic limbs to our bodies might feel less weird but if these innovations embarrass or make us feel awkward, they might fail. Ultimately our human external and internal characteristics are what attract us to each other. And attraction really matters.
Even our futuristic visions of what humans might look like with robotic limbs or cyborg-like attachments still have a distinctly human silhouette (see image below). Despite the anticipated adoption of tech, humans will still need to feel human. Live video, Amazon Echo, Google home, speech recognition, AR, VR — these are all simply extensions of our humanness.
How to Apply This Lesson To Your Work
As socially connected animals with interest in other humans, we love a good superhero story. Superheroes are fascinating to us because their powers are often just an extension of our own — just stronger, faster, and wiser. What we really want is to see farther (e.g. streaming video), reach further (e.g. remote home automation), time-travel (e.g. global live chat), feel wiser (e.g. AI translation tools) and leap higher (e.g. space travel).
Identify the biological sense, or senses, that you can amplify with your innovations. Supercharge customer’s existing biology with your product.
Ask your product team what they are doing to extend the senses of your customers. What innovations are you working on that will turn their senses into super senses?
Design Lesson from Biology #4: Specialize To Exploit New Niches
If physics abhors a vacuum, then biology adores a niche. In each ecological environment there is an organism to fill each niche. Species specialize, or optimize, so they can exploit a niche.
The greater the species specialization the greater the advantage they have over less specialized species.
The other half of the specialization equation is how each species gets to that solution. Biology finds solutions to the same problem but not always with the same product. For example, flying provides a solution for some species to access food and habitats that non-flyers cannot. Using different starting points biology has solved the flying problem in several different ways, and several different times (see image below).
In the product landscape we see this across product categories like smartphones. They all share features designed to solve a similar problem but have different physical designs, origins and might exist in different markets.
Humans will often use several different solutions to solve the same problem. Think transportation. You can use a skateboard, bike, car, boat or any number of public transport options to get around. As digital product designers at our design company we see this when people access tools on the web. When faced with a task, they use smartphones, tablets, laptops and IoT devices to access the same information. Put another way, they are always on, but not always on the same device.
What’s also apparent is that we are not seeing a substantial substitution effect in terms of adding solutions for access. If you buy a tablet, you don’t discard your smartphone. You simply add the new devise to the mix. Studies also show people that access information across multiple devices increase their consumption.
How to Apply This Lesson To Your Work
The bottom line is that your customers or users are adding more solutions to solve the same problems. For example, accessing news can be done on several digital devices and we can expect that number to increase over time.
How do you stay ahead of this complexity? First you must assume that the various niches will become more specialized and new solutions will be continually added. In our metaphoric biological environment this would mean more species per habitat. The second part is to spend time with customers in the context where they seek your solution.
That means visiting customers where they live and work, riding along with them, and watching what they do. See what specializations become apparent.
There is no single solution to any problem. Product creators will only know which is the best solution when they add context to their research. Remember NIHITO (Nothing Important Happens Inside The Office).
Design Lesson from Biology #5: Humans Are Emotional, And That’s a Good Thing
Psychologist and researcher, Lisa Feldman Barrett, cautions against believing we are entirely rational. Increasing evidence suggests that it’s our capacity for emotions that significantly contributes and balances our behavior. When we feel our experiences they can also be more rewarding, memorable and engaging.
The amygdala, limbic system and nervous system are primarily responsible for producing the associated reactions that course through our bodies and lead to us feeling our experiences. To understand how this internal pharmacy changes how we perceive and react to the world we need to look at the primary chemical products produced during experiences.
- Dopamine: Released during task-based interactions, dopamine is instant and fleeting. A buzzing phone or a social media notification are dopamine fixes and they can be highly addictive. Snapchat is all dopamine all the time.
- Oxytocin: This is the “love drug” you feel in a relationship. Oxytocin is secreted when we find friends, connect with people, or feel like part of a community. It’s so important that a lack of oxytocin can actually kill us. For example, when society wants to punish criminals, they are put in solitary confinement where there’s almost no chance of experiencing the joy of oxytocin. Facebook has build an empire on this simple idea: You’re either in the circle or out of the circle.
- Serotonin: Our brains deliver serotonin when we feel pride while working towards new skills and mastering goals. Apps that show progress towards a goal often solicit serotonin. The athlete tracking app STRAVA does a great job in visualizing your progress and comparing it to community member’s performance.
- Cortisol: Called “the stress hormone,” cortisol influences, regulates or modulates many of the changes that occur in the body in response to stress. A little goes a long way and helps you deal with daily demands on the body but too much cortisol and you’ll feel overwhelmed and possibly even compromise your immune system. Robots with anthropomorphic features are less intimidating and thus less stressful for the engineers that work with them (see image below).
- Endorphins: Generally released during and after physical activity, endorphins behave like opioids by reducing stress and making you feel happy. Most of you will know this as the ‘runners high’.
How to Apply This Lesson To Your Work
Brain chemistry drives emotions and emotions drive behavior. If you’re designing stuff that’s purely rational, you are probably missing an opportunity to deepen the relationship and establish meaning. When building products qualitative research should be just as important at wrangling the quantitative user data.
Make your users feel good and you win. Make them feel good in front of people they care about and you make them a superhero.
As in all knowledge about how people behave, we need to take responsibility for what we do with that insight. It’s not okay to manipulate people with this knowledge. You might fool them once or twice but sooner or later the brain will realize it’s being manipulated. When that happens you’ll never gain trust with your customers again. What are you doing to help them feel like they are a part of something meaningful? By associating lower stress and happiness with a product it might be possible to build a positive connection.
Conclusion
Biology is an exquisite design system that gives product people the tools and guidelines to see a little further into the future and make things people will really want. Think like a biologist and go out into the field to observe the world. Get out of your office and meet your customers in their natural environments. Observe them. Study them. Ask them questions. Make connections. Be a human being.
No company and no product can afford to miss this essential part of making great products. Even Apple’s SVP of retail, Angela Ahrendts, agrees. “I don’t care how advanced technology gets. I don’t think that there’s anything that can replace looking someone in the eyes, touching their hand, you know? I don’t care how many millions of Facebook friends you have. You don’t get that feeling. So I do think that it’s getting back to this incredible human connection and — and isn’t that how incredible things happen as well?”
