About four years ago, Kevin Dunn and Peter Stevenson, co-founders of Trustnode, approached me with a novel idea for selling insurance and financial products. They wanted to talk with me because of my background in user experience design and human cognition and perception.

Their idea was bold. They wanted to replace human sales agents with interactive 3D avatars who could sell insurance and financial products. These avatars would be programmed with deep knowledge about these complex domains and be able to answer questions clearly and patiently. Their interactive agent would never sleep, have inexhaustible patience, be available to anyone with a computer 24/7, and, most importantly, be trustworthy. Plus, they wouldn’t charge huge commissions on each sale (a bonus no consumer would argue with). 

I was showed a couple of demos. One was a 3D realistic avatar, a quasi-human looking guy in a suit and tie who was looking at me and telling me about insurance. The look of the 3D realistic avatar was well executed, but there was something creepy about him. While he appeared human and, on the surface, “intelligent,” I knew he wasn’t human, only pretending to be. Also, as I know enough about natural language processing; I knew I could trip him up simply by asking a question that wasn’t scripted. I simply didn’t trust the artificial guy.

Then I was showed a second demo. Instead of a quasi-realistic avatar, this was a cartoonish guy repeatedly walking down the same street and experiencing “bad things,” such as being struck by lightning, falling into a manhole, and the like. It was funny and engaging. I knew this cartoon wasn’t a person, but he was conveying responses I could relate to personally.

There was something fundamentally different about my response to the second design that led me to believe that cartoons, if properly designed and programmed, would be a better path to creating an effective virtual sales agent. It’s no secret that we love cartoons—just ask Disney, Pixar and Warner Bros. But what exactly is it about our brains that accounts for our love of cartoons in general, and how could this innate response to cartoons be turned into a powerful interactive sales tool?

Cartoons and caricatures

There is research in education and psychology on the effectiveness of line drawings, cartoons, and caricatures versus high-resolution photographs as representations of objects, events, and people.  An early study (Ryan and Schwartz of Cornell University) directly compared the speed of recognition of four different modes of representation of common objects: high-resolution photographs; detailed, shaded line drawings; simplified but accurate line drawings; and cartoons.

Participants were shown pictures of various objects (hands with fingers in different positions, knife switches in different positions, engines at different views, etc.) in each of the four modes. The pictures were projected at brief exposures, which grew longer and longer until participants could identify the objects. Interestingly, participants needed the shortest time to identify the cartoon drawings. The line drawings required the longest exposures; there were no significant differences in exposure times required for photos and shaded drawings. This study is significant in the context of using cartoons as interactive agents because it provides some deeper clues into the way our brains may encode information about the world.

External form to internal schemas

The Ryan and Schwartz experiment indicates cartoons and caricatures may work so well precisely because they do not accurately reproduce a scene in precise metrical fashion. They not only omit, but they transform, distort, and exaggerate the information in ways that appear to facilitate recognition.

The efficacy of cartoons may be somewhat less mysterious if we make some assumptions, based on earlier theories, about the mental structures underlying perception: namely, that our brains seek to encode any sensory input by fitting the sensory data to internal “schemas.” A schema can be thought of as a convenient way of abstracting out the prototypical, distinctive features of objects or events in a way that conserves, simplifies, and possibly exaggerates these features without trying to store rich detail.

Caricatures are another example of how exaggeration and simplification are effective communication devices. (Caricatures do a better job of conserving the set of distinctive features we use to encode real faces.) Think about Richard Nixon as an example. A cartoon of Nixon—with its exaggerated jowls, elongated nose, wavy hairline, and box chin—is easier to recognize than a photo of him. A caricature, although a frozen moment in time, can convey a person’s characteristic expression better than a photo because our facial expression—not the static structural features—is the hallmark of our face.

In other words, the brain interprets scenes, objects and events by using idealized, prototypical internal representations—concepts that never quite fit the precision of the real-world, but have to be adjusted to match any specific scene by using transformations. Cartoons likely work as well as they do because, somehow, their external forms (if well designed), come closer to mirroring the internal structure of our mental models or schemas than do realistic photos or precise drawings that are more faithful to the “real” thing.

Why we love them

But why do we find (some) cartoons funny, amusing or even heart-warming? One theory is that we find cartoons funny precisely because, in their very stylized, prototypical, exaggerated forms, they make us aware, perhaps unconsciously, of how our minds encode information; that a clever human artist has tapped into this tendency of the human mind to exaggerate, generalize and simplify. We find jokes funny not just because they have surprising or incongruous endings, but rather because jokes make us aware of the flexible nature of our internal classification schemes.

Although not scientifically proven, this concept of “metacognition”—combined with the power of cartoons as triggering mental schemas—may provide a key to understanding how the clever use of cartoons and even visualizations can be crucial design elements in computer interfaces.

A powerful example of this appeared in 1986 with the introduction of the Macintosh. When users first booted up the device, the first thing they saw was a cartoon of the Mac itself with a smiling cartoon face. Although simple, the cartoon helped create a powerful bond between the company and the customer. With it, Apple attempted to convey the metacognitive message: This device is not about math, it’s nothing to be afraid of, and it might even be fun to use. And more importantly, the smiley Mac created a personal relationship between the company and the user, which might have elicited the thought, “Somebody at this company cared enough about me to design this cartoon.”

Putting theory into practice

Creating a good cartoon character—say, tied to an insurance product—can be a powerful virtual sales tool. But to be effective the cartoon must follow some perimeters. They must: be easily recognized and remembered; trigger innate feelings of trust and lessen the user’s anxiety in confronting uncomfortable issues related to insurance; be built from a finite set of simple elements that can be easily mixed and matched to create new characters within new situations; and have simple character expressions that can be placed under programmatic control to create a range of interactive experiences.

In Trustnode’s case, the key design decision was to have a central character—a virtual interactive guide—that could engage the user’s attention and trust. Thus, Harvey Keck was born. Harvey, through a sequence of questions, could provide stories and visualizations while utilizing other characters. For example, a character would experience “bad things” and Harvey would explain the consequences and suggest how the proper insurance plan could help.

It’s a simple idea that works. The proof of its success is in the results. For example, a subsidiary of a leading international insurance carrier experienced a 200 percent increase in the take-up rate on its direct-to-consumer site (no call center support), plus a 20 percent increase in its call center take-up rate for prospects interacting with the Trustnode module before connecting with a call center, versus those who go directly to a call center. Additionally, one of California’s largest labor unions witnessed a 500 percent increase in take-up rates of a voluntary life and voluntary disability product offering by a large multi-line insurance company.

This provides real-world evidence that harnessing people’s innate responsiveness to carefully-designed cartoons and visualizations, combined with interactive knowledge bases, can serve as an engaging and effective sales tool for complex products such as insurance plans. 

Michael Mills, Trustnode co-founder, has held a variety of senior-level positions in the areas of user experience design and human interface at companies, including Katango, Intuit, Yahoo!, and Apple Computer.  He is a former Associate Professor of Telecommunications at New York University.  He holds a PhD in Communication and Cognitive Science from McGill University.