UX Planet — Medium | Anton Nikolov

Designing with human instincts in mind

This week’s article explores how the supernormal stimuli are influencing our designs and why we should consciously use them in ethical ways. Human instincts were an essential part of our survival in the past and still play that role today. However, today’s technological world is challenging these instincts in another way that can lead to harmful outcomes.

What are Supernormal stimuli?

Niko Tinbergen spent his career trying to figure out what made animals tick. I find particularly interesting one of his experiments with male stickleback fish.

stickleback fish — Image source

He wanted to understand what triggers their instinct of attacking other male stickleback fish in the mating period. In short, he tried simulating many qualities of a potential rival to see what makes them defend their territory. He used realistic fish models and even simple oval colored objects.

He found out that a red object even if it doesn’t resemble a fish shape, drives the male stickleback mad. In one instance, the fish even tried to attack the red postal van that was passing outside the building. Can you imagine? It seems these guys hate red color.

In the end, Tinbergen discovered that instinctive responses can be influenced and even exaggerated by manipulating the intensity of the stimulus. Thus the so called “Supernormal stimuli”.

So how does this translate to the human world.

Supernormal stimuli are exaggerated normal stimuli that we’ve evolved to respond instinctively to. People have hard time controlling these stimuli by exercise self-control. This is due to the reason that they are connected to our instincts that are/were essential for our survival.

Imagine a toy so cute you must cuddle and protect. Engineered foods and beverages that contain too much calories and salt that you can’t get enough of them. Games that trigger our instincts like hunting, exploring and etc. Erotic and pornographic content is another example of huge industry that depends on creating stuff taking advantage of supernormal stimuli.

Supernormal stimuli can lead to addictive conditions. People get closed in a loop looking to be stimulated again and again driven by dopamine rewards.

With the rise of VR and AR technologies, supernormal stimuli will play even more important role in our future designs. As Designers we need to make sure we manipulate these stimuli responsibly and our designs won’t cause addictions.

Response to brands, products and services can be influenced a lot by supernormal stimuli. Almost anything that sells in tremendous amounts takes advantage of supernormal stimuli. This is due to the instinctive responses in our brain that frequently happen without our conscious decisions.

We are instinctively drawn to designs that use supernormal stimuli. “I want this… cute…yummy…cool ..thing”. Younger people are the most susceptible to these kind of stimuli. Their ability to control their impulsive drives is even less than adults.

Consequences of abusing supernormal stimuli

If I have to use one word to describe the consequences it will be Addiction.

Almost all of us have experienced addiction to supernormal stimuli in some form. Some people might even reach a stage drives them to destroy their life or even harm people around them.

Recently I learned about a case where a mother lost her child(baby) due to malnutrition. The reason was that she was obsessed of playing a game where she was raising a virtual child. This is nuts!

“Luckily” most addictions cause by designed supernormal stimuli like TV shows, Games and Social media result in mood swings and agitation. This is observed when the affected user can’t interact with the supernormal stimuli due to some reason.

Exposure to these supernormal stimuli causes spikes in our dopamine levels. Dopamine causes us to want and seek out more of what caused the spike. It helps us learn that these stimuli makes us feel nice so we want more of it.

Design that aims to make users addicted is unethical. We must not released such design. We shouldn’t even create it in first place.

Our designs should deliver pleasure and stimulate the users without taking over their self-control. That’s where it becomes challenging. It’s very easy to abuse the supernormal stimuli to get people addicted to your product and thrive on top of their misery and addiction.

What we can do about it

We can be responsible and ethical Designers! Supernormal stimuli can help us design brands, products and advertising that are super effective at grabbing attention and long term interest.

However, we CAN’T only hope that the users will avoid habituation and will exerciser enough self-control to avoid addiction. As Designers we are responsible to create ethical design and have safe-guards in place to support the user, when self-control is lost.

Manipulating users with our designs and causing addictions is not right!

Good designers consider the supernormal stimuli when creating. Apps, Services and Physical products need to have safe-guards in place that can be triggered when needed.

We must be aware of the supernormal stimuli so we don’t allow them to become the norm in our designs. Design is a powerful tool that can be use both for bad and good. Designers are the ones that must point it in the right direction.

Supernormal stimuli and physical products

For example, food packaging and the food itself needs to be designed with supernormal stimuli in mind. This means we as Designers could create elegant visual communication and influence the portion sizes so that users can have easier time controling themselves. We must be like illusionist, making things look delicious and big, when in fact they are smaller and nutritious.

We can work with the shapes, colors and sizes to create well balanced designs that can keep the user healthy and well.

Often the toughest part of not abusing the supernormal stimuli are the business stakeholders. They always want to make more money, they have business to run! It is easy to forget that we are all humans, when money gets involved.

For that reason designers have to be extremely good communicators. With the power of verbal, written and visual communication we can significantly control the direction of our designs.

Supernormal stimuli and digital products

The internet, social media, games and videos. All of these tickle our primitive instincts of keeping our eyes on the moving object (prey or predator).

The constant flow of new information and motion followed by small positive rewards are a great way of using supernormal stimuli. We need to make sure that there are limiters that in some cases need to enforced time out on the user.

How cool it will be to have a default option in Facebook that prompts you after specific time to go and do something else? Feature designed by Facebook that prevents people from loosing their minds in the feed. Facebook for sure realizes that there are so many addicted people to the platform… I hope they are actually aware of the potential long term consequences and work on fixing that.

Just to say, I am not anti-Facebook. It is a great tool/platform when users can control themselves. Unfortunately not all have enough self-control to do that.

Another example is game design. Continues adventure and exploration supported with constant flow of small rewards to keep the dopamine levels up for hours even days. There are cases where people have died playing WOW for more than 48h without a break. This is ridiculous!

A simple solution could be to have a cool-down effect on the account after 8–12 hours of gaming. Even professional gamers need to sleep and eat.

Netflix way of delivering episode after episode is another way of using supernormal stimuli. Netflix has interesting way of handling users who have been watching non-stop for hours and haven’t interacted with the system. They ask if you’re still there and if everything is OK.

Not sure if they do it for the good of the user or it’s just so they can save expenses. At least, I think it is a step in the right direction.

Final thoughts

As designers we hold great responsibility to make sure our products will be aesthetically pleasing and functional without harming the user in any way.

Business priorities can sometimes stay in the way of good design and we need to do our best to stand our ground. Especially when we design stuff for the young generation we have to prevent addictions.

Designers should always design with human instincts in mind!

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Design principle: Supernormal stimuli was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.