Mad Pow
We invest the full force of our creative thinking and depth of experience to design innovative solutions that improve people’s lives and exceed our clients’ expectations.
Whether it’s using gameful design to spark healthy behavior change or creating the next generation of our clients’ products and services, we are the trusted advisors that help solve our clients’ biggest business problems.
Behavior Change is increasingly recognized as central to human wellbeing, social cohesion and sustainability. But effectively changing behavior is a challenging and complex process. We’ve been leading individual, organizational and community level change efforts across domains such as health, financial wellbeing, sustainability and lifelong learning and development.
Our expertise brings together the best methods in applied sciences, intervention design and interaction design to create unique value for our clients and partners.
Primary and Secondary Research
Most agencies can report back what participants say during interviews, but typically struggle to impart meaningful insights to the data collected – particularly when it comes to understanding behavior and behavior change. Changing something requires that you first thoroughly understand it. Our approach to diagnosing a problem, understanding at-risk or affected populations, their contexts and underlying determinants of behavior combines methods and toolkits from behavioral science, motivational psychology, public-health, and human-centered design to codify a rich portrayal of the problem space and where we should aim our efforts to help improve real-world challenges to human wellbeing.
We don’t believe in magical thinking but instead in a systematic process that integrates theory, evidence and the perspectives of our target populations at every step of the way.
Intervention Design
We design interventions aimed at changing individual, organizational and community behaviors linked to improving physical and mental health, financial wellbeing, learning and development. We design stand-alone or integrated digital solutions with real-world interactions that best address the contexts, cultures and capabilities of our client partners and intervention beneficiaries. We aspire to design solutions that maximize outcomes and minimize the burden and effort on the part of our target populations. We unify our behavior change, content, and interaction design teams throughout the process to ensure our solutions are evidence-based, engaging, rewarding and effective.
Measurement and Evaluation
Measurement and evaluation is a vital part of the behavior change design process. Our primary goal is to help clients maximize the impact of their efforts and investments. We aim to be both pragmatic and rigorous in our evaluation approach and scale our methods according to whether we’re assessing top-level measures like intervention reach, usage (uptake + engagement), or effects (efficacy, effectiveness, and impact); or evaluating more granular aspects of an intervention such as which strategies, components or techniques work better than others and/or for whom do they work. We utilize a range of study design from randomized evaluations, to quasi-experimental and non-experimental methods and we recommend conducting evaluation activities throughout all stages of an intervention lifecycle, from benchmarking existing solutions, to evaluating early concepts and prototypes to inform design decisions and direction, to pre-launch pilot testing, and post-launch evaluation and optimization.
Training and Capacity Building
We believe in the methods and frameworks we use when designing for behavior change. They’ve come together over the past 8 years through our experiences designing digital and offline interventions with a diverse array of clients, our academic partnerships with leading universities, researchers and labs, and our near obsession with the ever evolving science of behavior change. We offer one, two, and three day “off-the-shelf” custom workshops and trainings that introduce the principles and processes of behavior change design and how to apply them directly to the problem spaces and challenges participants are working on.