Good design does more than meet customers’ needs.
It gives people stories to tell. Traditional design philosophies, like ‘jobs to be done’, focus on user needs. Our Narrative Design approach goes further by looking at the ‘stories to be told’. The outcome is a consumer experience more likely to lead to brand loyalty because it addresses consumers’ functional and emotional goals.
Do your services inspire stories?
Our Narrative Design approach builds on traditional design-thinking philosophies by prioritizing the emotional experience as much as the rational one. We work with your team to figure out what the consumer experience is as well as how consumers experience it and what we hope they take away from it. The result is a service or experience that leaves an impact on their hearts and minds.
Questions we answer
How do we improve our customer satisfaction scores?
How do we keep our customers coming back to our service for the long term?
How can we shift our customers’ behaviors to be more productive and more fulfilling?
Our Service Design Process
Reflection
Every design project starts by gathering all of the information and inspiration we’ll need to develop new ideas. This includes auditing your current services and experiences, conducting research, and interviewing key stakeholders on your team. Together with your team, we distill everything down to inspirational insights that might inform a transformative new idea.
Investigation
Our workshops are designed to maintain focus and inspire creativity. Sometimes that means looking at comparables, taking field trips, or just mocking up ideas. We will design a session to meet the needs of your team and its objectives so we can wallpaper the room with new design concepts.
Storytelling
Through discussion, voting, and iterating, we help your team build out its ideas into prototypes and storyboards. The process guides us to the ideas that are clearer and easier to explain to others.
Effect
To make sure you feel confident in an idea, we evaluate and test it with your team and your customers. We share it with people who might actually use it so we can learn and refine the best ideas and quickly walk away from the worst. In the end, you’ll have an innovative new solution with data to support it.
Do it yourself with a Threadline workshop.
As part-time academics, we love sharing information. If you’re interested in learning how we do what we do, we have a workshop for you. We’ve codified most of our philosophies, processes, and methodologies so that we can train partners, employees, and clients like you. Check out our full list of workshops and contact us to discuss how we can elevate your skills and those of your team.
Related Services
Market Research
If you want to understand your customers, you have to understand their stories. A psychological review of customer stories reveals what they think about your organization and what it means in their lives.
Brand Strategy
Embedding your organization into your customers’ stories means building a brand that makes them heroes. Our Brand Narrative approach gives you the tools to build a relationship with customers that lasts a lifetime.
Social Science Advising
Looking through the lens of psychology elevates any project by grounding it in the irrational but predictable workings of customers’ minds. Our team of experts is available to add value by bringing social scientists onto your team.
Our Insights
The mind altering power of analogies. A review of Shortcut by John Pollack
Founder & CEO
Book Review