Beth Altringer Speaking Topics

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Beth Altringer Speaking Topics

• Designing for Desirability: Using Psychology to Create Products Consumers Really Want

  Successful products are both functional and appealing to human desires. Purchasing decisions are rooted in feelings far more complex than that of logical problem-solving, including internal self-fulfillment, external status, and attitude projection. By designing with a psychological perspective, desirability expert Beth Altringer says companies can build products that are less likely to fail due to foreseeable setbacks. Based on her seminal Harvard course now in its sixth year, “Designing for Desirability,” (also the subject of her forthcoming book) and customized for different industries and types of designers, Altringer elaborates on three to four out of more than a dozen possible examples of psychological phenomena that designers can build their concepts – and successful products – around. These include extended ability and mobility, creative expression, simplicity and ease of use, and trust. The goal is to be able to better tailor product designs to consumers, and to create the impression of product benefits that extend far beyond functionality to the realm of personal meaning and emotional connection.

• How to Design (and Innovate) for Trust

  Innovation projects in top companies only have a success rate of approximately 30%, and failure often has little to do with flaws in either technology or design. Having studied such projects for over a decade, Beth Altringer concluded that failure typically results from a breakdown of trust – either within a design team or with the external market once the product is launched. Trust affects whether and how consumers engage with other people, products, and services. Designing for trust is seldom top of mind at the start of projects, but when we look at research on why innovative most projects fail, it’s clear that trust should be a primary design consideration from the start. In this presentation, Altringer gives the audience new perspectives to think about and manage trust-related risks of their current design projects, as well as frameworks to make “designing for trust” a top consideration from the outset of future product innovation.

• Beyond Design Thinking: Pioneering Strategies for Product Innovation

  We live in an age of big data, but firms that have access to huge amounts of information about what kinds of products and services are liked and used – and which ones are not – often have no idea how to interpret that information. Instead, they gamble on the idea that certain demographics like or dislike a product rather than understanding the fundamental reason. In this presentation, desirability expert Beth Altringer helps audiences move beyond traditional methods of designing products and services to introduce more advanced innovation and design methods. These include understanding behavioral psychology and its influence on consumer decision-making. In doing so, Altringer gives designers a cutting-edge framework – a four-step process that challenges assumptions and incorporates experiments – for pursuing a winning product innovation strategy in an increasingly demanding and crowded market.

• Humanizing Apps: What the Competition Doesn’t Know About Making Algorithms Personal

  Algorithms increasingly govern our daily lives, from where we spend the night in an unfamiliar city to whom we should date. But few people realize precisely how these algorithms work, and their designers often lack a human touch when it comes to accommodating personal preferences, goals, and desires. In this presentation, Beth Altringer discusses the impersonal science behind algorithms like Tinder, which presumes to rate your desirability and that of your potential mate without regard to what will truly make you happy; or Airbnb, which decides what part of a city is best for you without seeking to understand what surroundings or accessibility you would actually prefer. Altringer, a foremost expert on employing the psychology of desirability in product design, not only explains to a non-technical audience how such algorithms imperfectly work, but addresses how their engineers can design these marvels of technology to have a more human, personal side, and in the process, gain an edge over competitors.

• Strengthening an Organization’s Innovation Decision-Making Process

  An organization can be filled with the best people available, and still fail to innovate and grow. Why? Because its structure and culture go a long way in determining success or failure. Companies need to design their decision-making systems to create and maintain high participant motivation. Otherwise employees and other key stakeholders risk feeling stifled, wasting precious time and motivation troubleshooting unnecessary situations, with less drive leftover to focus on the actual work. Beth Altringer draws on her knowledge of the psychology of design to go beyond product development to system design. A healthy corporate system is one in which people reinforce one another rather than get in the way, allowing a flourishing of innovative ideas and breeding a constructive competitive culture. In this presentation which can be reconstituted as an interactive workshop, Altringer helps organizations properly map their existing and ideal decision-making structure, identify weaknesses and examples of decisions that have a negative impact on morale and engagement, and design new structures that maximize motivation and remove barriers to innovative performance.