Customer delight and loyalty start with great experiences. Prototyping service design experiences helps you better understand the customer, create buy-in and alignment, produce valuable improvements quickly and efficiently, and bring ideas closer to reality.

Learn how to create the service blueprints and playbooks to deliver those services, seamlessly. This helps mitigate risk, exposes problems and opportunities. And it’s fun too.

How to Prototype Service Design Experiences 

We’d love to hear from you.

When the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) came to Ziba in 2020 to develop a campaign about reducing food waste in resorts, hotels, and cruise ships, they knew that public awareness campaigns have a mixed track record in terms of effectiveness. So they came to us looking for a new approach.

Awareness campaigns often make the mistake of assuming that people are uninformed, and that if they only knew the scope of the problem, they’d automatically change how they act. For a problem like food waste, this is a reasonable assumption: while most people know it’s better for food to get eaten than thrown out, its environmental impact is less well-known. Wasting food also wastes energy, water, land, and resources, and that has a long term effect on the planet.

, and just emphasizing that a bad thing is worse than you thought isn’t likely to change behavior. A campaign might have clever writing, great visual design, and a memorable message, but it’s up against a powerful opponent: inertia. People and institutions have set habits around the way they do things—including how they serve and consume food—and changing habits is hard.

So when Ziba partnered with WWF to develop the 

Toolkit for Communicating Food Waste to Guests

, we started by focusing on changing behaviors rather than making an argument or conveying a piece of information. Behavior change, after all, is part of most design problems, whether you’re trying to convince customers to embrace a new type of product, or design a health or fitness service that encourages healthier habits. If you view food waste through a similar lens, a whole new set of approaches snaps into view.

For one thing, we realized we needed to start the same way we do in most of our design projects: with research. For food waste, this meant meeting diners and guests where they were—at the hotel breakfast buffet, for instance— observing and interviewing them on how they responded to different messaging approaches. It also meant talking with guest services managers and waitstaff about their experiences, as well as running surveys and focus groups. 

What we learned was a little surprising. Everyone, from managers and servers to guests and diners, already wants to do their part to help reduce food waste. But they also have clear ideas of what they’re “supposed” to do in situations like a hotel buffet or cruise ship dining room. Doing what’s right for the planet is important for lots of people, but so is wanting to follow social norms, avoid extra effort, and enjoy the meal, cruise, or vacation they’ve spent so much money and effort planning.

Our research also showed that people like being part of the solution, even if it takes personal sacrifice—but the actions they’re asked to take need to line up with their own self-identity, and provide a positive emotional payoff. So they’re far less responsive to lectures and shaming, which can often result in defiance and dismissal.

The toolkit we designed celebrates the positive impact of decisions that guests make, and connects their actions to a larger, global movement. If you’ve ever seen those notecards in hotel rooms explaining more eco-friendly policies toward towel and linen laundering, you might’ve noticed how they talk about making good decisions for the planet, rather than dwelling on guilt and waste. They also present the more sustainable action as the default: you’re welcome to get fresh towels every day, but you have to ask for them.

Put the right message in the right place.

One of the best ways to ensure environmental considerations don’t get pushed aside is to put a relevant message right there, at the point of decision. When we have a moment to weigh our options, abstract considerations like sustainability become part of the decision. But in a busy buffet line, or when ordering from a rushed waiter, they’re easy to forget.

Be inspirational and directive, not prescriptive.

Finally, it’s crucial to acknowledge that every setting is unique, and the hospitality and brand managers who run them know them better than anyone. There’s a lot of inertia in the guest services industry, which is one reason change has been so slow. But these people are professionals, and just like their guests, they want to make choices that are better for the planet.

 aware of the food waste problem than most guests, because they see its cumulative effects first hand. But they also have a responsibility to not alienate their guests. That’s why the WWF toolkit includes an in-depth discussion of guest mindset and research findings, and it offers plenty of flexibility for managers to customize their own campaigns, or create one from scratch. 

The result has been overwhelmingly positive. By treating it as a behavior change campaign, and taking an audience-centered approach, we were able to deliver WWF something unusually accessible, customizable, non-preachy, and ultimately effective. The tools and mechanisms of behavior change are no longer a mystery — the real mystery is why it’s taking so long for the rest of us to start using them!

. If you have any questions or comments, contact us by sending an email to 

When the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) came to Ziba in 2020 to develop a campaign about reducing food waste...

Ziba x WWF

Ziba x WWF: Creating Better Messaging Campaigns Through Behavioral Design

If you’re like most consumers in the U.S. or Europe, you’ve been doing a lot more of your shopping online in recent months. With more people spending more time at home, e-commerce has accelerated dramatically, squeezing an estimated six years of growth into just a few months. This was driven mostly by necessity, but it’s also introduced a far wider range of consumers to the convenience and flexibility of e-commerce.

This change, though, has stripped away much of the joy of the shopping experience. Real-life shopping can be a wonderfully social activity, and its loss is something we’ve all felt. Pointing and clicking is fine if you’re stocking up on cleaning supplies, but what about the connection and excitement of browsing a curated retail space with friends? Seeing what catches your eye, asking an expert for recommendations, chatting over a purchase with your partner?

The technology to make digital shopping more social, immersive, and emotionally engaging already exists, but it’s never been brought together in a seamless, accessible way. What if it was? What if you could actually enter a virtual shop of your choosing, and invite your friends to join you in real-time? Introducing: ShopSocial™, our patented e-commerce platform.

The ShopSocial™ concept explores the wide range of possibilities that this kind of experience could offer. Using your existing tablet, smartphone, or laptop, ShopSocial™ invites you into a virtual retail space that’s already familiar, and intuitive to browse.

Create a social experience that drives digital foot traffic.

You’re free to explore on your own, of course, but imagine inviting friends—anyone in your contact list—to come along.

Learn about and connect with customers through real-time interaction.

For merchants, an immersive digital environment offers many of the advantages of in-person retail, like the ability to interact with customers in real time, learn about their habits and what draws their attention, and customize the space and inventory to maximize engagement. Sales associates can be located anywhere in the world, but answer questions and offer advice just as they would on the retail floor. They can also be called up at a moment’s notice—and dismissed just as easily.

Give customers the power to bring friends into the experience.

What may be the biggest advantage of social digital shopping is the ability to bring in anyone, at any time. Want to ask your trainer if you’re getting the right pair of shoes? Give them a call and show them. Not sure what your spouse thinks of putting an exercise bike in the living room? Not only can you call them up, you can show them exactly what it would look like, using a simple, accessible AR placement tool.

Give customers the ability to browse independently, increasing engagement and sales.

You can stroll the space independently, chatting about what you see, and show each other whatever seems interesting.

Bring products into the real world with AR experiences.

For smaller merchants, this kind of social interaction is a chance to push back against the overwhelming advantages that online behemoths like Amazon and Walmart have. By making digital shopping more social, the emphasis shifts from speed and selection back to the shopping experience, helping to level the playing field, and bring in more traffic. And the more information, social contact, and context you bring into that experience, the more confident shoppers are that they’re making the right decision—and the more likely they are to go ahead with the purchase.

The future of online retail doesn’t have to be confusing or overwhelming. In fact, it should be the opposite. We already know what it feels like to enjoy shopping in the real world—ShopSocial™ is how we bring that same joy and connection to the digital one.

Want to know more about ShopSocial™, and Ziba’s innovative approach to e-commerce? 

We’ve made online shopping social. Our patented e-commerce platform brings real-world human interaction to digital retail. 

ShopSocial

Putting the Humanity Back in e-Commerce

We’re all creatures of habit, and as anyone who’s tried to start a new exercise routine or stop doomscrolling social media before bed can attest, habits are hard to change. Up to 74% of US adults set New Year’s resolutions, for example, yet studies typically find that around 80% of them are abandoned by the end of February.

This difficulty can have real consequences for communities and businesses: getting citizens to separate their recyclables or convincing customers to embrace a new service can be harder than providing the service in the first place. Often, much harder.

Changing behavior, in fact, is one of the great design challenges of the modern era. It pits generations of ingrained human nature against an endless variety of incentives, nudges, and rewards that must be tailored to the task, and often to the group of people performing it. It’s incredibly difficult, but also too valuable to ignore. Designing for behavior change is how we provide a path for people to transition to new products and services, adopt better ways of doing things, and in many cases, live healthier, happier lives.

As a design and innovation firm, Ziba is often tasked with doing just that—new solutions often require new behaviors, and figuring out how to instill those is a huge part of the design challenge. It’s something we’ve done in categories ranging from healthcare, to CPG, to getting consumers comfortable with more sustainable products or behaviors. And in the process, we’ve found a few approaches that can reliably make these kinds of shifts a reality.

Some of this comes straight out of academia. The Fogg Behavior Model, created by Stanford professor B.J. Fogg, considers 

 as the primary building blocks of behavior change. Fogg’s thinking has influenced the founders of Facebook, Twitter, and Google—three companies that have done more to change how we go about our daily lives than nearly any other...at least since the invention of the Web. Other models, like Fishbein’s Reasoned Action Model, consider rewards, social dynamics, and reinforcement.

All of these models make good points, and they’re all effective to some degree. But human behavior is complicated, and it’s good to have more than one tool in your box. So rather than ascribe to a single model as the one true way, 

Ziba creative teams have settled on five approaches, which we’ve gone back to again and again.

For example, Ziba was recently asked by a major healthcare company to design services to support patients who had experienced heart trouble in the previous few months. Getting people to change their behaviors around things like diet, smoking, exercise, and regular check-ups is one of the most effective ways to prevent a second cardiac event, so this was where the Ziba team focused their efforts.

Several of the approaches above helped make this successful. For example, the program paired patients with “graduates” of the program, who acted as mentors, providing positive feedback when they made better lifestyle choices. This also gave patients a sense of social obligation—leveraging both Positive Consequences and Social Approval. But patients also had free rein to decide which behaviors to focus on, and an app and online tracking system for monitoring their own progress, rather than simply receiving a recommendation from a doctor and being sent away—a great example of Sense of Control in action.

There are numerous examples of how these approaches can enable real, constructive behavior change for real people, and we’re going to spend the next few weeks walking you through a few of them. Over the next few weeks, you’ll start seeing regular, short posts where we focus on one approach at a time. Each post will give examples of how we were able to apply it to change user behavior—to foster better health, enable a better way of doing things, or introduce customers to a new service or product experience.

If you’re curious how Ziba’s approach to user research and design for behavior change can help your company be more innovative, we’d love to hear from you. We’re always excited to talk with people and companies on the leading edge of technology and customer experience. And who knows, maybe one of these approaches—or another that we discover together—may be just what your breakthrough needs.

Stay tuned for our continuing series on Behavior Change, or 

Five Ways to Design for Successful Behavior Change

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Ziba’s auditorium has appeared over the years to be a forum for the kind of experimental theater that features actor and audience role improvisation and sets with makeshift props that are rearranged to suit emerging narratives. What has appeared on the stage is, in fact, 

 in action, a multidisciplinary design method that to many in our technologically advanced age seems incongruously low fidelity. Yet it is both the unfinished quality of the “stage set” and the audience and designers engaged in improvisational role play that lend themselves to surprising discoveries very difficult to achieve with other design methods.

It is Ziba’s experience that-- to adapt an old aphorism, “if you build it, they will play.” The two client engagements detailed below demonstrate that some playful experimentation with physical and “phygital” prototypes is a uniquely effective way to uncover and envision customer experience innovations and de-risk proposed CX investments.

A Coffee Retailer Adapts Its CX Design to the Craft Spirits Movement

When a global leader in the coffee industry asked Ziba to suggest ways to enhance their customer experience (CX), there was little room for improvement of many of its experience features: convenience and consistency, offering variety, and the coffee brand’s smash hit revival of the cultural and countercultural role that coffee houses have filled through the ages.

There had appeared at the time, however, a countervailing trend in experiences and experience design. It eschewed convenience in favor of slowing down and sensuously savoring the expert, artful nature of handmade aspects of life. The craft beer and spirits movements were redefining watering holes across the nation, as well as living room bar carts and patio parties, in ways that recalled America’s speakeasies during 

Ziba’s research and CX prototypes helped the coffee retailer grasp that it was in the midst of a contradiction: between the widespread convenience values of the marketplace and the showmanship and sociality of the craft spirits craze. Douglas Holt argues in 

 that brands should perform a myth “…that addresses an acute contradiction in society.” To explore this contradiction fully, Ziba conducted visits to other coffeehouses and bars, signed up for wine tastings, and studied the role of the barista and sommelier before designing and constructing three distinct experience prototypes—in just two weeks.

About thirty members of the client team participated in each, and, with prompting from designers, shared their feelings, observations and preferred CX prototype.

Given what the recent pandemic period taught companies about frontline workers’ invaluable operational insights, it was not surprising that the baristas’ prototype interactions revealed exciting design opportunities. Encouraged by Ziba researchers and designers to develop each prototype in any direction, from “mild to wild,” baristas improvised ways to mitigate the overly mechanized quality of fast coffee preparation and presentation. One prop, a Ziba-designed Lazy Susan, enabled the baristas to replace the current desultory practice of leaving orders on the counter with a more personalized interaction with the customer. With the beverage placed atop the pedestal and the customer’s name called, the barista would then wait until the customer could witness finishing touches of whipped cream or chocolate powder.

In response to customers’ and baristas’ observations about the bulky flavor pump bottles suggestive of mass production, Ziba fashioned a handsome countertop apparatus for flavor dosing with elegant bottles gently swinging back into place after use. The new piece of equipment would celebrate both the quality of the flavor additives and the barista’s skill in customizing each beverage. Moreover, observing this ritual moment, customers could be assured they would have their convenience and their craft too, thus securing the mythical role the coffee retailer plays in their lives. Shortly after the prototyping session, the coffee chain asked Ziba to build the flavor apparatus for trial in the market.

Eyewear Purveyor OPSM Uses CX Prototyping to Fend Off Low-Cost Competitors

OPSM is a leading international prescription eyewear retailer renowned for its eye care, due to its store-based optometrists and its advanced Acufit technology. Despite its deep designer offerings, the eyewear chain was not, however, perceived at one time to be the leader in frame style selection, a critical driver of consumers’ eyewear retailer choices. Lower cost competitors were proliferating, prompting OPSM to consider what role an enhanced customer experience might play in securing the chain’s reputation for both eye care 

 eyewear style. OPSM approached Ziba to find out.

Initial research revealed that copious and curated eyeglass styles were on display, and that the Acufit technology was impressively precise and helpful in decision-making about lens coatings, etc., but neither were meaningfully integrated into the customer experience. Employees’ rote responsibilities allowed little leeway for the kind of stylistic guidance that celebrates individual identity and personal choice. The environmental design and overall process still conjured a doctor’s office visit more than a styling salon.

These and other research findings were distilled into key insights and drivers during co-creative sessions at the OPSM offices involving a rudimentary CX prototype, storyboards, and sketches. Both teams sensed, however, that key customer moments and interactions still weren’t dimensionalized enough, that all the sensory, spatial, temporal, cognitive, emotional, and social elements and ephemera of a customer experience were impossible to imagine without further firsthand exploration. The next step: service, graphics, and environmental designers building a full CX prototype in the Ziba auditorium.

Consensus is great but strong conviction about new CX design decisions is better. As OPSM employees and customers explored the physical prototype, one such conviction was quickly formed around the “paradox of choice” impression created by too many eyeglass selections in front of the customer, as well as the proposed app-enabled solicitation of friends’ opinions. To declutter the experience and the customer’s mind, a new tray was envisioned as a focal point, its own spatial constraints encouraging a narrowing of choices. Once a final pair of eyeglasses was selected, the tray would be designed to be flipped over, revealing a leather surface with a custom slot for the eyeglasses’ prescription card. The overall impression? The world itself would appear more artfully designed once a customer had made a stylish eyewear choice.

Further decluttering of the junctures in the customer journey meant touchpoints were reduced from 18 to three. With less mess, and store signage that reinforced the personal style benefits of the right eyeglasses, the employees were now free to act as both stylist and “Acufitter.” Employee experience, as countless studies have shown, is critical to CX excellence, so OPSM would need an elevated, well-considered way for its employees to interact with customers and their store context. The mirrors consequently were outfitted with flattering lighting, and the service counters with gorgeous drawers for housing the stylists’ tools. Stylists would don aprons as customers approached for their final fitting, and, drawing from hair salon and barbershop customs, would be swiveled around to appreciate their newly bespectacled selves. A picture would be taken as memento.

You can read about OPSM’s successful new store prototype and 

How CX Prototyping Unleashes the Power of Play and Empathy

These and other successful CX prototyping engagements confirm the values this design method provides that are irreplicable by any other approach. Some paper-based or data-derived ideas quickly fall flat in the prototyped world. Other ideas arise with clarion force in a physical prototype, as actors’ embodied experience in the make-believe space helps them draw inspiration from their entire realm of experiences. The complexity of human behavior requires nuanced, empathetic design interventions, and those are best achieved—indeed, in many cases, only achievable through firsthand, felt familiarity with the customer experience the company hopes to provide.

Here's a short list of CX prototyping benefits to share with your colleagues:

1. Greater team conviction and clarity about which ideas to reject and which to build

 2. Deeper team members’ commitment to CX enhancements they had a hand in identifying

3. A wider range of CX design ideas engendered by the spirit of play that permeates CX prototyping exercises

4. Genuine customer empathy, which has been proven to be surest route to a company’s CX mandat

To learn how CX prototyping could benefit your business, and Ziba’s full range of prototyping services, reach out to:


Jim Couch

Simulate to Innovate:

CX Prototyping’s Wholly Unique Value

Ziba kicked off our design leader speaker event series with Clive Grinyer, Head of Service Design at the 

 in London. Clive led the Portland design community in a lively discussion about the expanding role that service design and customer experience are playing in delivering differentiated and sustainable human-centered solutions in Europe and throughout the world.

“Poorly designed services are insidious in a way that poorly designed products are not.” — Clive Grinyer

An acknowledged expert in design thinking, customer experience, service design, and digital transformation, Clive leads programs at RCA that apply human-centered design methods with system thinking to envision and deliver new breakthrough solutions for business and government entities. Having begun his career as a design consultant, in addition to his responsibilities at RCA, today Clive is a strategic advisor on user experience for Bosch, Innovate UK, and the National Health Service (NHS). Prior to RCA, Clive has set up and led design innovation teams across many global companies including Barclays Bank, Cisco, Samsung, and the European telecommunications giant Orange.

If you'd like to discuss the future of Service Design or be invited to our next design leader speaking event, 

Service Design is Here! with Clive Grinyer, Head of Service Design at RCA 

Ziba is excited to share we are now a certified 

, joining a growing global movement of companies dedicated to using business as a force for good.

To receive this certification, Ziba underwent a rigorous assessment administered by B Lab which measures and verifies several impact areas, including the environment, customers, community, and employees.


As a B Corporation and leader in this emerging economy we believe:

That we must be the change we seek in the world.

That all business ought to be conducted as if people and place mattered.

That, through our products, practices, and profits, businesses should aspire to do no harm and benefit all.

Ziba is committed to many more years of working sustainably and doing our best for each other and future generations.

Dedicated to Using Business as a Force for Good 

In designing for behavior change, creating a relevant and actionable feedback loop at the point of action is an effective method to help people modify their behavior.

If you’ve ever seen a sign on the side of the road with the words “Your Speed” posted above a large, digital numeric readout, then you’ve witnessed the power of relevant metrics. You probably slowed down a bit, too. In study after study in multiple countries, these radar-equipped Your Speed signs have proven more effective than speed traps and citations at curbing speeding.

This may seem surprising, given that the sign isn’t handing out any fines, and is only providing you with information you already have (assuming your car’s speedometer is working). But it’s also leveraging a powerful lesson learned by behavior researchers over the years.

Changing our behavior is made difficult by the simple fact that we’re often not paying attention to what we’re doing. After all, we perform dozens of different tasks every hour, from breathing to walking to deciding where to point our eyes. If we were consciously focused on all of it, we’d never get anything done.

Applying relevant metrics snaps us back to attention by creating a 

. The loop starts when you measure something that someone is doing, show the measurement to them, compare it to a desired result, and give them the ability to alter their behavior. When all of this happens in quick succession, we almost can’t help but modify what we’re doing.

This principle of providing actionable feedback at the point of action has shown up in a variety of digital experiences over the past few years, driven by smaller, cheaper sensors and processors, and faster networks. Wearable devices like the FitBit and the Nike Fuelband use relevant metrics to get people walking and exercising more; the dashboards in many hybrids and electric cars use a similar approach to encourage more efficient driving habits.

For Ziba, relevant metrics have unlocked a number of powerful digital experiences, such as the Detroit Connect dashboard our digital team developed for Daimler Trucks North America (DTNA). In this case, there wasn’t so much a problem to be solved as an opportunity to be seized: modern trucks generate torrents of real-time data, and DTNA knew that there were big gains to be had in efficiency, safety, and vehicle uptime, as well as significant cost savings—

But like so many innovations, a data-driven truck fleet requires people to shift their behaviors. So rather than take the conventional path and turn data into reports with recommendations on fleet management, we worked with DTNA to create a real-time dashboard. It gives drivers and fleet managers the ability to adjust routes and maintenance schedules, and see the impacts almost immediately. By providing relevant metrics in an accessible format, at a time and place where they could be acted upon, the Detroit Connect dashboard has improved vehicle uptime and delivery speed for over 30,000 vehicles, while cutting fuel and maintenance costs.

Sometimes, the best way to get people to change their behavior—whether that’s speeding less, walking more, or changing how they manage their fleet—isn’t to tell them what to do. Sometimes it’s better to simply show them what they’re doing, let them know what’s possible, then step back and let them do the changing themselves.

Five Ways to Design for Successful Behavior Change: #5 Relevant Metrics

The current emphasis on Customer Experience is bewildering to me. Shouldn’t it have always been the focus? 

These days, not a week goes by without a client reaching out to us for Service Design, Digital Design, or User Experience Design. Before that, it was User Centered Design (UCD), and before that, Design Thinking. Some of these—Service, Digital, and UX Design—are distinct disciplines, and important enough that Ziba has spent years building our capacity to provide them at a world-class level. UCD and Design Thinking are simply principles of good design practice that have been packaged and marketed in a way that makes them sound innovative. All these terms, though, have at some point been a buzzword—a “flavor of the month” that’s been marketed and written about so much that companies become convinced they need it in order to stay competitive.

What gets lost in this frenzy to find the next big design trend is the customer, which is really the reason we’re designing in the first place. The Customer Experience (CX) is, in our opinion, the umbrella that all these other disciplines sit under and defining and implementing an effective CX strategy eclipses any other design task an organization might have.

Through hundreds of project engagements over the last 25 years, Ziba helped pioneer the “experience economy”, recognizing early on that the design of customer experiences is what matters, not the design of things. Of course, we had no idea what to call this approach, which today would be defined as CX and Service Design. We were simply pushing ahead to do what was best for our clients and their customers, and in the process helped evolve the field of Design (with a big D).

Outside In: The Power Of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business

, the market research firm Forrester cites several examples of 

 over the previous two decades. Our role in transforming how FedEx interacts with in-person customers gets special attention, as an example of how research-driven insights can reveal small changes that have a big impact on the consumer experience. In 

naming Ziba as a global Service Design agency

, specializing in Fuzzy Front-end Innovation, Physical and face-to-face Experience Design and Digital Experience Design.

The work that earned us this recognition didn’t feel revolutionary at the time, just appropriate to the task at hand. When we started incorporating user research into product development in the late 80s, it wasn’t because User Research was the hot new thing at the time (it wasn’t). It was just the best way to get to a product with maximum business impact for our clients. The same was true when we brought brand archaeology into the front-end innovation process in the early 90s, to help frame opportunities more clearly. And in the late 90s, when products started being replaced by services, and services started moving online, we brought Digital and Service Design into our studio too. Not because of a pile of magazine articles, but because that’s what was needed to provide the right customer experience.

If the purpose of a business isn’t to serve customer needs and provide them with their desired experience, then what is it? Is there a business without a customer? I guess when there wasn’t much competition, the specifics of the customer experience could be left to chance, because there was little choice. But as goods and services proliferate, and information and access become global, it’s hard to think of a single category where customers don’t have alternatives and their experience is the most important thing.

So perhaps that’s the answer to the question of “Why CX now?”: As technology empowers consumers, more companies are finally waking up to the fact that a great customer experience is the only differentiator they have left.

Why CX now?

When designing new behaviors, by taking advantage of people’s existing experiences, transformational metaphors help ease the transition and adoption of new behaviors.

If you think back to the first time you picked up an iPod, chances are you knew how to use it almost instantly, even without looking at a manual. That’s the power of a 

: an embedded design cue that lets users engage with a new product or service as if it were familiar. By taking advantage of people’s existing experiences, transformational metaphors leverage established concepts and interaction patterns to ease the transition to new behaviors.

 introducing the iPod, Steve Jobs asserted that “...listening to music will never be the same again.” Except that, for anyone familiar with a portable transistor radio, the experience of using it 

 largely the same, again. Jonathan Ive, the designer most responsible for the groundbreaking device, never came out and said that he’d based its simple design and intuitive click-wheel on Dieter Rams’ 1958 Braun T3 transistor radio—but pretty much everyone else on the Internet did. The similarities are striking: clean lines, a minimal aesthetic, and most of all, a perfect circle for dialing in your music selection.

The iPod’s wheel, which also echoed controls on analog TVs and thermostats, allowed an entire generation of music lovers to adopt a new set of behaviors almost instantly. Apple often achieves its famously intuitive, user-friendly experiences by leaning heavily on this sort of metaphor—think of the Genius Bar you walk up to in an Apple Store, for another example.

Leveraging familiar interactions isn’t just a strategy for high-end consumer electronics. When Oregon-based Umpqua Bank approached Ziba to help them reimagine the banking experience, we used a similar, metaphor-based approach—less literal than the iPod’s, but just as effective.


Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, regional banks in the US were closing branches, moving their services online and becoming increasingly impersonal. But Umpqua saw an opportunity to head in the opposite direction, by embracing their local communities, and making banking a delight rather than a chore. Even with a wide range of digital options, research showed that customers increasingly wanted human interaction and a comfortable space when making important financial decisions. 

So the Ziba team drew on familiar environments where customers already feel relaxed and supported, like cafés, boutique hotels, and high-end retail spaces. Umpqua’s branches were reimagined as “stores”, with great coffee, free WiFi, and comfortable places to sit and browse financial products, which were arranged in physical displays, like luxury goods. Employees went through a Ritz-Carlton hotel training program, and offered chocolates to customers at the end of each transaction. To make the stores a seamless part of their communities, Umpqua designed them as multi-purpose spaces that transformed after closing time to host everything from exhibitions and yoga classes to music performances and movie nights.

Each of these decisions takes a desirable aspect of a familiar environment—café, hotel, boutique, community center—and translates it into a new context, allowing an unusual approach to banking to feel accessible. Customers had probably never seen another bank like Umpqua, but they felt instantly at ease. This service and environment design strategy was then scaled up to dozens of stores, driving a period of phenomenal growth that has made Umpqua the largest regional bank in the US, with 350 locations across five states.

One uncomfortable truth of innovation is that, done wrong, it can just as easily turn off customers as inspire them. But by casting the new in the form of the familiar, new behaviors don’t have to feel so daunting. In fact, with the right balance of innovation and metaphor, they can be positively delightful.

Five Ways to Design for Successful Behavior Change: #4 Transformational Metaphor 

Changing behavior is one of the most difficult design challenges we face. To get someone to change the way they perform a task, giving them an alternative that makes them feel accomplished and in control is a great way to do it.

There’s an entire genre of social media content on sites like Reddit, Facebook and Instagram, loosely grouped under the heading “Oddly Satisfying”. Some of it is simply talented artisans or craftspeople plying their trade—watching a woodworker turn a rough chunk of wood into a beautiful bowl is, indeed, oddly satisfying. But quite a lot of it is 

. Pressure-washing is one of the most common subjects, with videos of fences or driveways quickly transformed from filthy to pristine racking up millions of views.

If you’ve ever used a pressure washer, a lathe, a wood chipper, or even a powerful vacuum, blender or food processor, you probably understand the intense satisfaction that comes with having the power to transform your situation and surroundings. A high-performance sports car or growling Harley-Davidson delivers a similar sense of satisfaction. Many of us look forward to using software like QuickBooks or TurboTax for the same reason. And this sense of power or control has the ability to change our behavior—in the case of the pressure washer, it can even convince us to enjoy cleaning!

Leveraging this sense of power or control is an incredibly effective tool in the designer’s toolkit too. If you want to get someone to change the way they perform a task, giving them an alternative that makes them feel accomplished and in control is a great way to do it.

Consider healthcare, for example. In many places—the US especially—most people’s experience with healthcare is the opposite of empowering. A lack of information, complex systems that make little sense from the outside, and the realization that your health depends on the expertise of people you don’t even know, all conspire to make you feel decidedly out of control.

So when Ziba designers were approached by Sharp to develop a new patient journey, one of the primary goals was to make them feel empowered. And one of the best ways to do that is through transparency: when customers feel like they’re getting all the information they need about a potential service or expense, they also feel in control. For Sharp, this meant consolidating all of a patient’s relevant information into a single web portal or mobile app, and giving them access to the information they value.

Critically, this started with a research effort where the Ziba team spent time talking with patients, to understand where they felt under-informed. The result is a digital experience that pushes appointment information, test results and chart notes to patients as soon as they’re available. It also provides cost estimates of procedures, and clearly indicates what insurance is likely to cover, and what expenses they can expect to see.

Healthcare in the US is still extremely dependent on face-to-face and phone interaction, largely because patients often feel disempowered. By providing more transparency and a sense of control, Sharp’s new customer experience strategy is a way to nudge patient behavior, so that digital interactions can be used for some informational interactions. When people feel in control and well-informed, they’re less likely to need the reassurance that comes from meeting in person or talking to someone on the phone.

All of this helps save time, effort and money for everyone involved. And for the patient who no longer has to spend time on hold or navigating a phone tree to get a simple piece of information, you might even say it’s Oddly Satisfying.

Five Ways to Design for Successful Behavior Change: #3 Sense of Control 

When the Prius hybrid first hit the market in 1997, it didn’t look much different from other cars Toyota was producing that year, despite its revolutionary technology. It also sold only 123,000 units worldwide over six years. It wasn’t until the second-generation Prius came along in 2003 that the world saw the slab-like sides, wedge silhouette, and futuristic console that most of us associate with the Prius name. 

Nearly 6 million Priuses have been sold since then, making it by far the most successful line of hybrid cars ever produced, and paving the way for the now booming market in plug-in electric vehicles.

So what made this redesign so transformative, and popular? One likely answer is that the second-gen Prius leveraged people’s desire for social approval, by drawing just enough attention to itself to act as a sustainability badge of honor. In the early 2000s, buying and driving a hybrid was still something of a novelty, and it required you to change your behavior a bit as a driver. You started it with a push-button and shifted with an unfamiliar knob. You had to get comfortable with an engine that goes silent at stoplights, and learn a different maintenance ecosystem. All of this was off-putting to a lot of people. But the payoff was dramatically better fuel economy, and perhaps more importantly, recognition from others that you were both environmentally and technologically ahead of the curve.

Taking advantage of that human desire for recognition and social approval was one of Toyota’s smartest moves with the Prius. By making the car different enough to be noticeable, but not ostentatious or bizarre, they gave owners permission to say “look at me!” in a quiet voice. In many social circles, this brings approval that can scratch the social itch we all have to some degree.

Of course, using social approval to sell is nothing new—people have been trying to “keep up with the Joneses” for millennia. But beyond just convincing people to buy things, social approval can nudge all sorts of new behaviors, from quitting smoking and staying active to volunteering and giving to charity. The Adidas All Day app, discussed in a previous 

, uses both positive feedback and community approval to keep people exercising.

A more recent Ziba project, to develop a messaging strategy for the World Wildlife Fund, uses this approach to persuade people to adopt behaviors that reduce food waste in restaurants, hotels and resorts. During interviews early in the project, Ziba researchers found that nearly everyone they spoke to wanted to do their part to waste less food. But they also wanted to follow social norms, avoid extra effort, and enjoy the meal or vacation they’ve spent so much money and effort planning.

In this context, social approval is an especially powerful motivator, since eating out is such a social situation. So the messaging toolkit we designed takes pains to celebrate the positive impact of food-saving decisions—like taking less at the buffet—that guests make, and connect their actions to a larger, global movement. By emphasizing the communal aspect of food-saving efforts, these messages give people the sense of joining an approving, supportive group through their actions, and that appeals to nearly every segment of the target audience.

How might your next messaging effort appeal to the instinct for social approval? How could you link a new behavior to a sense of community and unified action? Opportunities for making these links are everywhere, if you know where to look—even in the shape of a car or the wording on a poster.

Five Ways to Design for Successful Behavior Change: #2 Social Approval

If someone tells you you’re especially good at drawing, you tend to draw more. Getting good grades inspires feelings of pride that often prompt us to work harder. For most of us, in fact, not a day goes by without some kind of positive feedback reinforcing one of our behaviors, whether it’s in the way we engage with social media, choose where to spend our money, or make decisions about our health.

Integrating positive feedback into the design of products and services can be a profoundly effective way to guide behavior. The Noom health and fitness app, for example, explicitly markets itself as a “behavioral science-based program” designed to help you to take control of your health. Given how emotional our relationships with food can be, it only makes sense that bringing in behavioral psychology principles could help us understand and improve eating habits.

There were health-tracking apps before Noom, of course, but they tended to collect and present data in a very matter-of-fact way. This misses an opportunity to leverage feedback in a way that makes the advice and services they offer more likely to be embraced. Noom’s real breakthrough is the way it integrates education, motivation and self-efficacy into its user experience. After entering health data and fitness goals, each user is paired with a specialist trained in cognitive behavioral therapy, who helps guide them through a unique, AI-assisted program.

Rather than prescribing a predefined diet, the Noom app focuses on self-awareness, teaching users to take control of their behavior and—crucially—to feel good about their choices. Instead of using guilt and shame to discourage eating “bad” foods, this approach uses real-time positive feedback to help people change the way they think about food. The app takes a similar approach to fitness targets, helping users change exercise and activity habits through in-app affirmations and personal coaching.

When Ziba worked with Adidas to develop the

 fitness app, we drew on similar lessons, using positive feedback to motivate, inspire and challenge users throughout their personal wellness journey. Like the Noom app, All Day combines data (gathered from a smart bracelet) with nudges based on behavioral science principles. So in addition to expert-designed advice on movement, nutrition, and rest, it also provides personalized positive feedback, celebrating specific achievements.

But what really sets the app apart is how it leverages its community of users to add weight and credibility to that feedback. By communicating with each other, the (primarily female) users of Adidas All Day are able to support each other, offer praise, and celebrate success. This element of real-time, human feedback, combined with the tangible benefits of a healthier lifestyle, means app users stay motivated and get results—in a way that simple metrics and static workout plans never could.

In the end, what matters is the choices that people make, especially when it comes to health and fitness. But one thing behavioral science tells us—and Ziba’s project experience confirms—is that making people feel good about those choices is a reliable way to make them last.

Five Ways to Design for Successful Behavior Change: #1 Positive Consequences

Emotional benefits and positive practical outcomes play a huge role in guiding people’s decisions and behaviors. Feeling happy, rewarded or smart about your last workout, the new shoes you bought, or even volunteering to help those less fortunate—these all play an outsized role in the choices you make. This is why emphasizing the core benefit of a design solution, like saving money or meeting a need, is so important when trying to drive new behavior.

Will others think better or worse of me if I do this? 

Deep down, we all care about how we’re viewed by others, and decisions about our behavior—including what to purchase—aren’t immune to this influence. Linking a behavior to approval from your family, your kids, your friends, or a social network can be a powerful way of encouraging or discouraging it.

This is where “ease of use” and human factors can make a real difference. When the DOS operating system first came out, many potential users found it intimidating, because of the specialized knowledge it took to operate. But when the graphical user interface and mouse came along, with a more intuitive mode of interaction, it disrupted the PC market and brought millions of consumers on board.

 A Transformational Metaphor is a way of casting a new, unfamiliar behavior in the form of a more familiar one, to ease its acceptance. The iPod scroll wheel, for example, used a dial for navigation and control—already familiar to anyone who’s used a thermostat, analog TV, or old-fashioned transistor radio.

 There’s a saying among engineers that “what gets measured, gets fixed.” The same goes for behavior. Giving people the ability to track their actions and then see the results in real time creates a feedback loop that can help quickly shift behaviors. Modern machine learning and automated pattern-spotting can add data-based insights to the mix, making the effect even more pronounced.

Having a sense of community unites us and being a part of community can make us feel like we are part of something greater than ourselves. 

Beyond connectivity and belonging, community also has a more practical function as a validation tool. Across communities large and small, groups of humans come together and recognize patterns—those patterns establish an authentic, shared source of truth. New, self-organizing models of micro-communities are establishing the foundation for what will be good, true, and trusted in the decade ahead.

Consumers are eager for a remedy to digital isolation. Looking for any excuse to step into those casual everyday engagements that were once a staple of the human connection.

Today’s communities are self-organizing into networks of micro-cultures. These smaller groups become more valuable faster because of their influence, interconnectedness, and trust. Smart brands embrace these new decentralized networks to monetize, mobilize and co-create with fan communities and expand their reach. The challenge many brands face is how to move at the speed of these micro-communities and engage in the serendipity necessary to be a part of their everyday world.

Forward-thinking brands are asking what role they might play as they activate new initiatives for community-building. Rather than starting from scratch, savvy brands can support existing communities and their micro-influencers to become valued participants and instigators of engagement.

Quantum Clarity: Future of Community

So as the Ziba team developed the toolkit, we considered when and where messages are placed just as carefully as what they say. One size does not fit all in a hotel, restaurant or resort environment. It’s important to have quick, actionable messages as you’re deciding what to order or how much to take; in an elevator or lobby, on the other hand, a more nuanced and conversational message can help to make the food waste challenge feel approachable and solvable.

, we looked at three methods for optimizing individual creativity. In part two, we’ll continue to examine this topic in the context of team creativity, through five methods that work at the scale of the group.

Businesses need an authentic narrative to connect with consumers and create impact, and this requires editing. There can be no clear, compelling story without it.

We arrive at cogent, impactful solutions by distilling all of the ideas we’ve generated down to one: the end result of what’s often a messy, fluid editing process. As necessary as ruthless editing can be, it can be challenging when clients develop an attachment to the ideas they’ve generated. This makes sense, of course—we all fall in love with ideas! But the role of design is to balance idea generation with editing, to guide the distillation process and arrive at a refined solution that can be understood and implemented.

Organizations that lack momentum are discovering that simplification can rally clients and consumers around a fresh, creative vision.

The goal of simplification is to train an organization to identify the essence of their ideas or concepts, leading them towards what is most critical in achieving their goals. For example, simplification helps organizations identify which products, processes, and concepts make them more agile and adaptive. Underlying this practice is the simple fact that we function better with fewer choices: simplicity is a path to confidence, through clarity.

When we move too quickly and embrace only what we already know, we don’t tap into the full richness of the mind and the heart. Harnessing the full potential of both is critical to creativity.

Prioritization means choosing what is most important at any given moment. Paradoxically, being able to prioritize with agility is a way of moving faster, not slower. It’s ultimately more effective to do the next best step, rather than trying to predict all the steps that will lead to a desired outcome. Especially since each step can often change the array of options as you move forward.

Teams that feel confused, tired, and stuck are switching gears to re-energize and re-engage productivity and potential solutions.

When a team is deeply engaged in a design project, it’s tempting to refine ideas and solutions until they feel “perfect” before sending them out for feedback. But often, you’ll get more done by taking something 80% of the way to “perfect” and then getting it out there. By working in shorter, iterative segments, we become more productive than if we’d just pushed through to an end result. The value of getting feedback sooner opens up perspective and keeps us from spiraling. Switching gears is an opportunity to return to a more productive mindset; stepping away when we are stuck is usually more powerful than pressing on.

An idea goes nowhere unless it reaches others’ hearts and minds. Communicating effectively can start a movement, and catalyze change.

Good designers don’t just develop ideas, they also communicate them clearly. The best designers make sure they understand the problem, and the solution they’re proposing, as deeply as possible. This depth of familiarity makes it possible to speak in simple, bold, direct terms, which can ultimately make the difference between a good idea that gets executed and one that quietly dies.

Optimizing Creativity for Business Impact: Part Two

Business success requires creativity. This was true in the past, and it’s even more true in times of accelerated change and disruption.

But to be creative, leaders must deal with discomfort and ambiguity, while competing at the speed of digital. Creative thinking helps organizations solve emerging business problems by enabling them to generate fresh ideas. The most successful organizations are able to jumpstart this conversation, by playing with unlikely connections that expose fresh solutions, allow them to think differently, and provide unexpected perspectives.

The danger in doing this is that not all new ideas are right, and it can be difficult to tell them apart from the others. When unclear ideas proliferate, chaos ensues. So clarity is critical, but getting there requires editing, simplifying, and distilling what you’ve generated into a refined and useful subset. It can be a slower, more painstaking process, but ultimately it’s more fluid—if the organization has optimized for it.

Having struggled with the process of solution refinement for decades, we’ve gradually built up a short list of approaches that work. There are eight methods in total, which we’ll describe in two parts. Part one covers three methods for optimizing individual creativity; part two covers five more methods, that can also be applied across teams.

When team members feel they are not adding value, adopting a singular mindset can reignite a sense of purpose, and reestablish each individual's scope of control.

Human beings don’t multitask well. While it can seem effective in theory, and even feel productive when you’re doing it, studies repeatedly show that multitasking makes us less productive, by distracting us and increasing our tendency to make errors and repeat tasks.

How to Prototype Service Design Experiences

Explore Ideas

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Perspectives

Perspectives

All Posts

Simulate to Innovate:
CX Prototyping’s Wholly Unique Value

Service Design is Here! with Clive Grinyer, Head of Service Design at RCA

How to Prototype Service Design Experiences

Dedicated to Using Business as a Force for Good

Five Ways to Design for Successful Behavior Change: #5 Relevant Metrics

Why CX now?

Five Ways to Design for Successful Behavior Change: #4 Transformational Metaphor

Five Ways to Design for Successful Behavior Change: #3 Sense of Control

Five Ways to Design for Successful Behavior Change: #2 Social Approval

Five Ways to Design for Successful Behavior Change: #1 Positive Consequences

Five Ways to Design for Successful Behavior Change

Quantum Clarity: Future of Community

Ziba x WWF: Creating Better Messaging Campaigns Through Behavioral Design

Putting the Humanity Back in e-Commerce

Optimizing Creativity for Business Impact: Part Two

Optimizing Creativity for Business Impact: Part One

Future of Platforms: Fairy Godmother

Ziba Pays It Forward

Future of Platforms: Soulmate

Let’s grow old together

We’d love to hear from you.

Explore Ideas

Most Read

Perspectives

Perspectives

All Posts

Simulate to Innovate:CX Prototyping’s Wholly Unique Value

Service Design is Here! with Clive Grinyer, Head of Service Design at RCA

How to Prototype Service Design Experiences

Dedicated to Using Business as a Force for Good

Five Ways to Design for Successful Behavior Change: #5 Relevant Metrics

Why CX now?

Five Ways to Design for Successful Behavior Change: #4 Transformational Metaphor

Five Ways to Design for Successful Behavior Change: #3 Sense of Control

Five Ways to Design for Successful Behavior Change: #2 Social Approval

Five Ways to Design for Successful Behavior Change: #1 Positive Consequences

Five Ways to Design for Successful Behavior Change

Quantum Clarity: Future of Community

Ziba x WWF: Creating Better Messaging Campaigns Through Behavioral Design

Putting the Humanity Back in e-Commerce

Optimizing Creativity for Business Impact: Part Two

Optimizing Creativity for Business Impact: Part One

Future of Platforms: Fairy Godmother

Ziba Pays It Forward

Future of Platforms: Soulmate

Let’s grow old together

We’d love to hear from you.

Simulate to Innovate:
CX Prototyping’s Wholly Unique Value