How to improve customer engagement with little details

Short post today about an article I recently read on Bruce Temkin’s excellent blog about how the design of formularies influenced the response rate of customers to a very serious question : are you willing to give your organs after your death?

It remembered me a video posted a while ago (in 2009 to be precise) of staircases transformed in a musical instrument and showing how it made people change their behaviors.

Here’s some food for thought for the weekend…

These two examples are in fact similar : they prove that you can influence immediate behaviors and engagement through optimal design. In the case of the forms to become organ donors, what is leveraged is the inertia of people. People chose to do nothing rather than to take a conscious decision which led to the dramatic differences observed.

In the case of the staircase, designer leverage the “need for fun” of people.

In both cases natural behaviors were leveraged to reach strategic goals.

I’m challenging you … instead of drafting strategies, implementing them and learning from your failures, why wouldn’t you define clear and objective goals and analyse backwards which consumers’ behaviors need to be slightly changed to reach those goals ?