Designing for Impact Happy Hour: The 2024 San Francisco Climate Week Edition
As part of San Francisco Climate Week, Allelo hosted a happy hour that brought together climate tech founders and investors. The event, co-sponsored by our fabulous partners at Impact Hustlers and Just Fare, provided a blend of interactive experiences and networking aimed at fostering effective design in climate technology.
Bringing Behavioral-Science-Backed Design to Life
Not just any happy hour! In an effort to alleviate awkward networking moments and have a good time with some relevant concepts for our collective work, this happy hour featured several activities highlighting the impact of behavioral science-backed product design and its effect on climate technology adoption.
Cognitive Bias Basketball
The happy hour featured several activities highlighting the impact of behavioral science-backed product design and its effect on climate technology adoption. One of these was cognitive bias basketball. Guests played with biases like ambiguity effect, loss aversion, and confirmation bias, throwing balls at the biases that act as the greatest barriers to their businesses.
Founders saw all three biases as challenges, with a slightly heavier emphasis on ambiguity bias. Investors saw loss aversion and confirmation bias as their biggest challenges, with a slightly heavier emphasis on confirmation bias. The conversations around this activity involved people sharing some of the challenges of understanding their prospective customers. Seed and Series A founders, for example, struggle to find the right people for research, but can’t afford steep recruiting agency fees.
Good UX/Bad UX Photo Booths
Why A Well Designed Customer Experience Matters
Another activity involved guests wandering through a series of two contrasting photo booths. Each booth was set-up differently: one well-designed well, with clean backdrops properly positioned, a seamless, clear, and beautiful digital interaction with the device, and excellent results. The other was set-up with poor lighting, a misplaced backdrop, a wonky and unclear digital interface, and the result reflected the design. This direct comparison emphasized how a good user experience can influence customer satisfaction and product success.
The dorky photo was from testing out the “Good UX” booth. Conversations around this activity highlighted how incredibly frustrating it can be to work with tools that are designed poorly. We had a really good time figuring out how to create this activity with our collaborator Scott Roeder at OhSnap.
Looking Forward
As Allelo continues to explore the development of brain trusts to create standards, tools, and training in climate tech digital design, the insights gathered from this event will help us shape design solutions for the industry. San Francisco Climate Week may be over, but the conversations and connections it sparked are hopefully just the beginning! Allelo will keep experimenting with events like this one in the future. Reach out to info@allelodesign.com if you’d like to collaborate or attend!