Pink is the color of happiness. Pink Frog brings joy to our clients and their customers. Joy is evoked in design with micro-interactions and an understanding of your users. Repeated strikes of an emotion cause it’s perceived intensity to increase. Happiness turns into joy after repeated positive interactions. Users remember the peak and endpoint of any experience. We focus on understanding your users’ emotions and finding out what constitutes exceptional customer experience. Happy users are more trusting and loyal.
Frog
Frogs are symbols of joy, luck, money, prosperity, abundance, wealth, and friendship in many cultures. Used as an amulet and talisman, they are strongly linked with transformation and magic and are believed to bring good luck. They are the magic in fairy tales and the secret ingredient in magic spells. The three-legged money frog, wealth frog, and lucky frog are three of the five Chinese gods that offer protection against misfortune and enrich a business or household in wealth. According to ancient Feng Shui beliefs, placing a frog near you dispels evil and attracts wealth.
Frogs are the happily ever after in fairy tales. If you kiss a frog, it turns into a prince. Frogs are the only animal that can only move forward and not backward. They can see in all directions without moving their head. A frog is often the elixir in magic potion.
Interactive
Interactive because we improve interactions at each touchpoint in your customers’ journey. We help you leap over your competition. We interact with you, your customers and your stakeholders to help you:
Tame complexity of your products or services.
Deliver innovative products and services that your customers love.
Decrease customer support calls.
Communicate complex information.
Help your customers intuitively navigate your product and services.
Help you understand how your customers learn and make decisions.
Help you understand how your customers define what constitutes an exceptional customer service.
Raise customer satisfaction scores.
Raise net promoter scores.
Gain more trust and loyalty from your customers.
Raise stock prices – companies that invest in design outperform 2 to 1. The key differentiator in companies is a positive customer experience. Customers choice products and services that are easy and joyful to use.
Pink Frog Interactive was hired to map out customer touchpoints (on and offline) for larger and smaller customer accounts around the globe as part of an exceptional customer experience project for a 14 billion-dollar company. While interviewing the customers about their touchpoints with our client and their decision-making points, we found that all three user groups around the globe did not believe that they could order as many samples as they needed to prototype the product. The engineers believed they could only get one sample and would often call managers and distributors to try to get more. The managers and distributors, using the same poorly designed interface, also believed they could only order one sample. In addition, finding mating and tooling for the sample part was difficult due to poor search futures, interface content, and nomenclature.
Ordering samples was a key decision making touchpoint for engineers. In fact, it was the most critical. Once engineers ordered samples to spec into their product the chance of changing them at a later time was almost nonexistent. While the engineers preferred our client’s products over the competitors and were even willing to pay more for them, they often believed they were forced to go with a competitor because they could easily get as many samples as they needed quickly and easily.
In contrast, their competitors did samples very well. They knew ordering samples and having easy access to mating and tooling parts for the samples where all key decision making points. The competitors had overnight samples on the front of their website and made mating and tooling parts just as easy to access. Once the part was in the prototype, the sale was made.
Let us help you empathize with your customers, understand your customer’s touchpoints, customer journey and decision-making points.
This law mandates government agencies assess new or redesigned digital services — websites, forms and applications — and prioritize usability improvements based on impact.
We partner with you to design, assess and improve the customer experience. We study how people learn, navigate spaces, make decisions, memorize, perceive, behave, and at what point in their customer journey they make decisions, how they make decisions, how critical the touchpoint is in their decision making, and what their expectations are of your services. Innovation, trust and brand loyalty comes from knowing your customers.
We help you collect qualitative and quantitative data relating to the experience and satisfaction of your customers, identify areas of concern that need improvement and improve the delivery of your services both online and offline.
Pink Frog Interactive is a boutique design consultancy that provides customer experience design for public services. We specialize in making complex processes, interactions and information clear.
Our mission is to create a better world by conducting human-centered design, making the complex clear, and solving complex problems with design thinking. Understanding peoples’ unique challenges, emotions, culture, and goals allows for empathy. Empathy creates compassion which is necessary for shifts in mindset. Shifts in mindset change the world.
We’d be happy to discuss with you how our services can help.
If your organization does not yet have a staff dedicated to improving customer experience design, you can choose to become our partner or simply use our services for certain projects.
Choose an improved customer experience, choose to dominate complexities with Pink Frog Interactive.
Pink Frog Interactive was showcased in the top picks for the best Pennsylvania based UX Design companies. “The startups and companies are taking a variety of approaches to innovating the UX Design industry, but are all exceptional companies well worth a follow.
We tried to pick companies across the size spectrum from cutting edge startups to established brands.
We selected these startups and companies for exceptional performance in one of these categories:
As a designer, I study people – the way they think, act, perceive, learn, memorize, etc. Part of these human factors are cognitive biases. Confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias that favors information that confirms previously existing beliefs or biases.
People seek only the information that validates their existing beliefs which tends to make them believe it more whether right or wrong. Here are some ideas to avoid confirmation bias.
Understand your tendency to exclude other opinions and facts and seek information that only validates your existing beliefs. Think For yourself. Do your own research. Question what you hear and see. Don’t just follow the crowd belief.Validate information with what you personally hear and observe. Sincerely listen to an opposing view without feeling your ego is being attacked and defending your stance. Seek information outside your normal comfort zone. Check all facts before jumping to conclusions. Challenge assumptions. Don’t read this and assume it doesn’t apply to you.
What are the least effective ways to eliminate confirmation bias?
Kick everyone off your social media page that doesn’t support your view. Name call and attack people with different points of view.Demean or stop talking to others that don’t agree with you. Surround yourself only with information and people that confirm your beliefs. Profile people into wide groups with sweeping generalizations – if you believe this then you also do x, y and z.
What ways can the government help with confirmation bias in government services?
Verifiable Data
Transparency
Accountability
Empathy – Understanding people’s unique challenges, emotions, culture, and goals allow for empathy. Empathy creates compassion which is necessary for shifts in mindset. Shifts in mindset change the world.
In the end, we will remember most the actions, character and behaviors of our family, friends and neighbors and the character traits they exhibited during this unprecedented time.
Our vision is a country where people have equal access to public services because they are designed in a way that is thoughtful, intuitive, easy to navigate, transparent, accountable and user-centered.
Emotions are important in design because they are a powerful motivator and can influence perception, cognition, attention, decision-making, learning, memory and behavior. If we can learn how to evoke, predict or assess a specific emotion in design, we can better present information in a way that aids in understanding and retaining information and communicate more effectively.
Extreme states of emotions such as anxiety, fear and anger can complicate learning because they interfere with sensory perception. Sensory systems allow us to make sense of ourselves and our surroundings and if distorted can cause the emotional organization of our experience to be compromised. As a result, learning can be detrimentally affected. Under stress users can develop tunnel vision and auditory exclusion. For example, they wouldn’t hear an alarm going on while trying to complete a task.
When a person is highly aroused, as in a very shocking or surprising situation, they are more likely to form a memory of the event and possibly a distorted memory. Arousal (excited/calm) has been found to be a better predictor of memory retention than valence (pleasure/displeasure). However, strongly negative things tend to automatically be highly arousing, leading many to think that better memory is correlated with negativity. If we are depressed, anxious or tired, we are more likely to have difficulty remembering. When we are upset or distracted, we cannot concentrate as well which impairs our memory. Too much stress results in poor performance.
To help communicate with your customers during periods of stress, fear, or anxiety several design principles are critical.
Use bite-size chunks of information
Users can only consciously process small amounts of information at a time. Grouping and chunking information aids in memory retention.
Consistency and standards Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Be consistent.
Error prevention
Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place.
Recognition rather than recall
Make objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.
Aesthetic and Minimalist Design
Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.
Anticipation
Anticipate the user’s wants and needs. Bring to the user all the information and tools needed for each step of the process.
Inconsistency It is just important to be visually inconsistent when things must act differently as it when things act the same.
Good design is design thinking made invisible. Now more than ever, it’s important to understand and empathize with your customers, make doing business with you easy and intuitive, and provide clear communication.
Emotions are important in design because they are a powerful motivator and can influence perception, cognition, attention, decision-making, learning, memory, social interaction, health and well-being, experience, behavior, and aid in managing information overload. Designers who learn how to assess, evoke and predict the emotional status and response of a user, can better present information in a way that aids in understanding and retaining information and communicate more effectively. They can create a better customer experience.
A partial list of design elements that can evoke an emotional response through sensory stimuli include: color, pattern and repetition, space, proportion, typography, sound, animation, motion, signs, symbols and images. In addition, designers can evoke emotions through interface design principles including, but not limited to, clear navigation, feedback, error prevention and recovery, scale and contrast, craftsmanship, structure and organization, and consistency.
Being able to assess your users’ emotional state is important. User’s who are stressed have problems memorizing and often experience tunnel vision. Repeated strikes of emotion cause it’s perceived intensity to increase. An angry customer can become furious with a couple of bad experiences. Customer experience is the number one differentiator. Companies that can provide a great experience will have loyal customers and gain trust.
Repeated strikes of emotion cause it’s perceived intensity to increase.
Other methods of evoking an emotional response include meeting expectations, allowing for play, and storytelling. In order to assess and predict the emotional response of users to a product interface or service, designers need to do research and testing to understand the environment and emotional needs of the user. They need to understand the stakeholders, ecosystem, customer journey touchpoints, and solicit domain expertise.
For example, customers using services for homelessness, foster care, school 504 disability services, veteran healthcare, etc. could have feelings of tunnel vision and stress due to their immediate situation or past experiences. Being able to navigate the services and information will depend on how well it is designed with an understanding of their emotions.
There are a variety of methods for measuring emotional response including, but not limited to, participatory design, questionnaires, experience diaries and body response measurements. Design research is needed because the way a stimulus is sensed is sometimes modified by needs, personality, experience, beliefs and attitude. In addition, a designer should be aware of how a user’s cultural background can influence their emotional response to design elements.
FAPE (Free Appropriate Public Education) is the educational right of all children in the United States to receive an education that is free and appropriate. Federal law requires school districts to provide FAPE, meaning that the school must provide a free and appropriate education to children regardless of their disabilities or special needs.
The term “appropriate” is ambiguous and is constantly being redefined by the courts and legal precedents. A 2017 Supreme Court ruling stated that for schools to claim they are providing FAPE, the students must receive meaningful benefit from education. The Supreme Court determined that, “[t]o meet its substantive obligation under the IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act), a school must offer an IEP (individualized education program) that is reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress appropriate in light of the child’s circumstances.” The Court additionally emphasized the requirement that “every child should have the chance to meet challenging objectives.”
FAPE is defined by meeting specific criteria under 504 (Section 504 is a part of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 that prohibits discrimination based upon disability. It is an anti-discrimination, civil rights statute.) and IDEA. Section 504 provides that: “No otherwise qualified individual with a disability in the United States . . . shall, solely by reason of her or his disability, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance . . .” It states that the school must meet the needs of students with disabilities as adequately as it meets the needs of their non-disabled peers.
All children deserve to have a meaningful education that is challenging, safe and inclusive.
The Challenges in Achieving FAPE
Currently, public education services for special needs students are highly complex, often with limited or no transparency or accountability. Parents of public school students with special needs (children who are gifted, medically disabled, allergic, diabetic, or epileptic, etc.) must seek and understand complicated, ambiguous, and evolving information about their children’s educational rights. They are required to learn a lot of complex information quickly so that they can to advocate for their children. The stakes are high and timing is often critical. There are multiple stakeholders at many levels. For medical needs such as food allergies, the parents should understand Section 504 and ADA (American with Disabilities Act) laws, recent cases, and school district policies.
Each special need requires a legal document–such as a 504, IEP or GIEP–each with their own set of rules and guidelines that differ per state. There are state policies, federal policies, and school policies. Each document has different rules that are overseen by different government departments. Each document is a legal contract with varying degrees of enforcement.
How Can Service Design Help to Achieve FAPE?
What is Service Design?
Service design is design thinking. Wikipedia defines service design as the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between the service provider and its customers. Service design may function as a way to inform changes to an existing service or create a new service entirely.” In short, service design is planning and developing how all facets of a service work together to meet customer needs successfully. This includes every interaction customers have with the service and all touchpoints along their journey.
How Can Service Design Help?
The tasks that are completed during service design, such as ecosystem mapping, stakeholder interviews, and customer journey mapping would allow a holistic view of the students’ and parents experience with education services. Service design is customer-centered. By understanding the end customer (the students and parents), we can better understand how to build a service that meets their unique needs and how to improve the current method of delivery.
Understanding Customers’ Emotions in Service Design is Critical
The strong emotions that parents with special needs children experience make interaction more difficult. The services that the children receive could determine the children’s future and could even mean the difference between life and death. Parents often cannot take the time to follow the recommended procedures or to seek due process should they disagree with the school district.
Many parents of children with special needs live with chronic anxiety. Research has shown that parents of special needs children experience stress similar to that of soldiers in combat. Stress impairs memory and decision-making. People experience tunnel vision in high-stress situations and cannot focus on the larger picture.
Information overload leads to mental fatigue, a reduced ability to accurately process new inputs, and negative affective responses. Parents and schools need to trust one another especially when children have life-threatening medical needs. Parenting special needs children requires more time and advocating, leaving parents with little time to research.
Parents need tools to help with negotiation, conflict management, and emotion management. Research shows that memory is distorted with high arousal levels and negative valence (fear, anxiety, stress, frustration). Each repeated strike of emotion causes the perceived intensity to increase.
Mapping the Ecosystem
Mapping the ecosystem uncovers the dynamics of how an entity delivers its services and customer experience. Ecosystem mapping gives a greater understanding of the interdependencies and previously hidden processes, procedures, and root causes of problems. It allows for better communication across silos.
In service design, stakeholders, the customer journey, touch points on that journey such as interactions online and offline, and each interaction are examined. Each touch point is then designed to be intuitive, clear and easy to navigate. The process is redesigned as needed and the pain points and best practices are noted.
Giving Parents the View That They Need
A school cannot provide FAPE unless parents have a transparent view of the information, processes, and timelines involved in providing services and unless the school is accountable for implementation. Service design allows for transparency into the process. Design thinking and strategy allow for rethinking how we provide education by focusing on the unique needs of the customers.
What Can We Do?
Pink Frog Interactive is a boutique design agency that provides service design for public services. We make complex processes and information clear. We’d like to capture the process of working with schools to obtain IEPs, GIEPs and 504 plans through crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is the leveraging of knowledge to achieve objectives–children’s safety, inclusion and FAPE.
Pink Frog Interactive, Inc.
Pink Frog Interactive is a global design and design research consultancy. We design products, services and improve customer experiences. We specialize in making complex processes, interactions and information clear.
Located in Gibsonia, PA (Greater Pittsburgh Area)
About the Author
Tammy Fritz has over 25 years experience in design. She is CXO, Principal and Founder of Pink Frog Interactive, Inc. She founded Pink Frog in 2004. Tammy has a passion for combining human factors, design thinking and research, innovation and technology to help solve complex problems.
