Consulting

æStranger Consulting

Are you struggling with creating an engaging experience for your audience?
If so, we offer a variety of tailored product-based services that can help you solve those problems in any shape or form.

æStranger helps you to create specific and tailored audience experience design solutions to solve your particular business problem.

We work with you to do thorough research into who you are, who your target audience is and what their wants, needs and behaviours are. Through this, we try to maximise the success rate of the solutions we develop with you.

As such the audience experience design solution will be custom-built for you, in otherwise a unique experience.

Our Audience Engagement & Experience Design is an analogous approach methodology. Using a broad base of experiences across multiple mediums for over a decade, we use analogy-based processes to develop out of the box solutions, which include first principle thinking systems, to analyse and implement engagement methods in new and innovative ways.

The design methodology utilises behavioural psychology, gamification, marketing, strategy and more to create an engaging experience for your audience.

If you want to know more, then you are welcome to contact us.

Or if you wish, you can jump straight into it and book a session through the options below, and we can explore together what the possibilities are for you.

To make these sessions worthwhile, you should have a few things ready and sent through to us prior to the call:

Project idea & Goals
Reason for the project
The motivation behind the project
Questions around AEX design solutions – wants, concerns, doubts, fears, etc.
And a possible budget & timeframe for the solution and outcome
Requirements for approval, and likelihood thereof (if relevant)

Creating an AEX design solution is probably not easy to sell internally or to stakeholders. So if you have any concerns at all, then please do consider booking one of the 30-minute, 60-minute or 2-hour sessions.

Below are a variety of options, you can start with a paid 30-minute call with Albert van der Meer, and discuss your specific problem, and see if we can deliver what you need and want. And this can evolve into either some of the other consulting call offerings or into full-day consulting sessions to develop, implement and execute a customized audience experience design solution for you.

Short Sessions

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Long Sessions

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Examples of the types of Sessions offered @ æStranger

Audience engagement & experience use-case

Engaging Your Customers with AEX Design & Gamification

Client proposal example – environmental and sustainability company use-case. The client wanted to increase the engagement of their customers with their own purpose-built website as well as increase and improve the behaviours of their audience with sustainable practices in the home. To do this we outlined a proposal that would look at and evaluate a set of aspects for the audience’s experience journey.

Proposal & background
Initial evaluation
Player/User journey
Suggested flow & mechanics/elements
Project timeline

This particular example project would fall under the 10-day consultation package.

Proposal & background

Proposal

Goal: User behaviour change.
Problem: User’s are not continuing their journey beyond the initial free product acquisition.
Objectives: Getting user’s to take the desired actions in the player journey flow by using mechanics such as taking part in challenges, communal activities, creating a communal identity and implementing sustainable practices in behaviour.
Purpose/Points of interest: Saving money, saving the environment and promoting sustainability.

Background

Methods: Using AEX design, gamification methodologies and processes, as partly outlined in the book Press Start – Using Gamification to Power-up Your Marketing.
Analysis: Evaluation of audience experience using the perspectives/lens of behavioural psychology.
Execution: Implementation of the various concepts is done using tried and true methods from Marketing and Business Strategy.
More information can also be found on aestranger.com

Initial evaluation

Evaluation of an example company

Objective(s): Creating engagement for the user to take the next step in their journey and partaking in individual and communal activities/challenges to save money and the environment.
Desired behaviours & actions: To encourage responsible and sustainable behaviour, allowing for a saving on resource ‘consumption’, saving on expenditure and creating the communal activity of donating to local communities and charities to further promote sustainable practices and usages.
Audience/Users: Home-owners and renters, with likely a Flesch reading level of 70.0 or higher.
Motivators: Improving overall user engagement by placing greater focus on specific motivational levers such as Purpose, Belonging, Mastery, Esteem and others.
Experience path: Current visual & interactive user experience can be improved and augmented by evaluating the experience flow and using the 4 stages of the ‘player journey’: Discovery stage, Onboarding stage, Scaffolding stage and Adept stage.
Metrics & feedback: Creating more engaging and immediate feedback-loops for the user when taking part in challenges and the community to further encourage desired behaviours and actions during their journey.

Audience experience journey

Player journey: Taking the user through a 4 stage player journey to encourage behaviour change.

Discovery: First impressions – Clear statement of Purpose and Belonging: Aligning your aims with those of your users and initial steps towards an inclusive and supportive community – Creating a compelling organisational narrative and communal sense that engages the (new) users straight away.
Onboarding: Process of integration – Guiding the user to learn and Master the system and creating a Safe environment for them to continue their journey – Use of ‘tutorials’, clear progression system and initial incentives.
Scaffolding: Improve comprehension – Building on the onboarding stage and giving the user more Autonomy in decision making and realising their need for Belonging – Customisation of experience and ability to communicate and educate with the wider community.
Adept: Mastery of experience – The ‘end-game’ of the user experience, raising the user’s Esteem, expanding on their need for Belonging and playing with their sense of Safety – Done by creating epic events/milestones, mentoring and engagement opportunities with the community and unpredictable and/or unknown rewards for continuing their journey.

Suggested flow – example mechanics/elements

Narrative: Implementing a story element to the user’s journey – allowing them to connect with and engage with either the story(s) of other users who have gone through the experience and/or with a fictional story (possibly based on the organisation’s mission statement).
Teams: Expanding on this dynamic aspect, allowing for more localised competition and creating
specific/collective objectives.
Progress: Creating a representation of the user’s progress, either through experience (points) and player levels or similar.
Communication: Allow users to communicate more openly with each other, creating an opportunity for them to share tips, tricks and hacks for various sustainability practices and methods.
Rewards: Variation of rewards depending on time and difficulty of challenges and quests, as well as hidden rewards (Easter eggs) for users who compete in a series of challenges or participate in the community.

Project outline

Done in a series of levels to help develop the design for behaviour change & increased overall engagement:

Level 1: Initial consultation & evaluation – Defining desired outcomes for the ‘Player Journey’, overall (S.M.A.R.T.) goal(s) and objective(s) to be achieved by the end of the project.
- x days
Level 2: Running through the current ‘player journey’ flow – going through the entire journey experience, mapping out, analysing and taking apart what the user currently experiences, listing pain points and narrowing down the desired goal(s) for you and the users.
- x days
Level 2.1 Weekly meetings for kick-off, check-up, discussion and review of continuing process to improve the user journey.
- Minimum of roughly one 1-hour meeting per week for the duration of the project.
Level 3: Expand on the initial evaluation and start development for the improved user journey based on the in-depth analysis from Level 1 & 2 – this builds on the analysis detailed in the previous slides of this proposal.
- x days
Level 4: Delivery of full design & engagement document(s) of the improved ‘player journey’ with defined objectives, recommended actions, segmented/targeted user base, detailed outline of mechanics & elements to be used, and feedback-/metrics required.
- x days

*Initial estimates of work required for the proposed project scope will vary from project to project*

Chief Crafter & Consultant

Albert is a consultant based in Germany and the Netherlands, with expertise in narrative and visual entertainment, storytelling and teaching, with experience gained as a freelance filmmaker, media producer, and team-building facilitator. He has worked with many international businesses, including Education First, Hult International Business School, GetWaterFit, T-Mobile, and UK Sport.

Still wondering?

If you are unsure of what you need or want, then you can contact us for a paid consultation session in which we will explore with you what you want.