We recently connected with Nicole Dery and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Nicole thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.

Yes! Allelo approaches Experience Design (XD) with an impact lens. Experience design defines what people go through when interacting with a company and its products or services. Anytime you buy something in a store or on an app, someone has designed how that experience works. Allelo’s approach is similar to standard design thinking in terms of the steps we take, but different in that it adds systematic measurement of a desired impact outcome to each of the steps in the design thinking process.

We get a lot of questions about what impact is, since it’s a huge umbrella sort of word and can mean so many things. We define “impact” pretty much the same way that the impact investment community does – we design with the intention to generate positive, measurable social and environmental impact alongside financial returns. This could look like increases in economic mobility or reductions in greenhouse gas emissions or how well a company supports its employees well-being, etc. The specific impacts we are designing for depend on our client’s goals and the nature of the products they are creating. What designing for impact means in practice is we ask questions about, think about, measure and design for impact, which will hopefully become a design industry standard someday!

Nicole, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My formal training is in applied anthropology. I’ve always been super curious about people and how they interact with their environments and one another. I’ve been a design researcher my entire career, which has been wonderful because it’s allowed me to use that curiosity in a meaningful way – to help design things better. Sometimes, I’ve contributed to the design of better physical products like surgical instruments or garage doors. Sometimes to the design of better programs or policies or organizations. Sometimes to the design of better experiences.

That’s what I do now – lead a team of designers and researchers and strategists. We provide custom front-end interaction and user experience design, primarily to early stage climate tech companies. We help founders of these companies design the experiences they deliver to their customers and generate maximum positive impact. We help founders make their products easier to use. We also help them with strategy and storytelling.

Climate change and emerging advanced technologies are driving dramatic shifts in the way we live, work, and relate to one another. The magnitude of this change is forcing us to rethink everything – our behavior, our interactions, and our policies, and while we’re at it, the global economy. We must rethink how companies create value.

But redefining ourselves and the future is hard. It’s super complicated. And many businesses don’t yet understand how to pursue profit through purpose. As they figure it out, they must rely increasingly on digital interactions to manage products and services and communicate with their stakeholders. For connected populations, digital interactions are a ubiquitous part of our daily lives. Globally, on average, people are now spending almost 7 hours a day on the internet. Every single digital interaction within that 7 hours must be designed.

Companies that get this right thrive.
Design is a differentiator. Organizations with mature design thinking processes deliver an average ROI of 85% with increases in user satisfaction, productivity, ratings, boosted brand credibility, and higher revenues. This is why digital design is a crucial component of transitioning to a purpose-driven economy. And this is why my co-founder and I started Allelo. We’ve seen clients big and small struggle mightily with design. And that’s without trying to redefine themselves as purpose-driven companies.

Digital is a critical part of our transition to any future worth living in. In building that future, we need to evolve traditional human-centered design models to think beyond individual users to impacts on communities and our environment. This adds complexity to the design process. Different product features and functions matter when we’re thinking beyond the end user, when impact is the route to prosperity.

Imagine what the first ride sharing app would have looked like if its makers were focused as much on reducing carbon emissions as they were on rapid growth. It would have looked and felt very different.

There are lots of great designers and firms talking about and working towards responsible design. This is such a beautiful reality. What we haven’t seen emerge yet is a rigorous, systematic, repeatable approach to embedding an impact lens and measurement into the human-centered design process. So, Allelo is creating one. We don’t have it all figured out yet. And we certainly aren’t doing it alone. But we have a bold vision for greater impact by design. We’re working towards it. I’m super proud of that!

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

There are two resources I wish I knew about early in my career because I suspect they would have saved me a lot of heartache and wasted effort.

The first is my priorities journal. It’s basically a method of identifying the top 3 most important priorities for any given moment of time (day/week/year, etc.) and writing them down. It’s analog, not digital. Something about the physical act of thinking through the most important tasks and writing them down helps me focus in a world of infinite opportunity for distraction. Any paper notebook will do. I use a new palette of colors each year because the colors make me happy. Some people use specific methods like Bullet journaling or Eisenhower matrices. These are all great. You can go down a serious YouTube hole watching people decorate their Bullet Journals, but it doesn’t have to be elaborate to be effective. I have my business coach to thank for turning me onto this simple and powerful idea – thanks Sam!

The second resource I wish I new about earlier on in my career is a technique called pre-mortems. I am a pathological optimist and I struggle with seeing what can go wrong, so pre-mortems have helped me a lot. They are derived from a Stoic concept. A pre-mortem involves thinking in a systematic way about the worst case scenarios. For example, what if that client that owes you $50,000 doesn’t pay you and you can’t pay your colleagues? Thinking about the worst case scenario you can imagine has a weird calming affect, like staring down a lion instead of running. Hopefully you won’t get eaten, but if you do, you see it coming. It helps me prepare to deal with things better when they do go wrong.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

We are a B2B business in a pretty specialized and somewhat saturated market. We’ve been experimenting with all kinds of marketing strategies ranging from paid ads to sustainable swag distribution to working with lead generation partners. Our sales cycles are long. The most effective strategy we’ve found to date is simple. We build relationships, one relationship at a time. We meet people, talk with them about who they are and what they want to accomplish. We listen and learn. We explore fit together. We show up in those conversations with integrity and honesty. When our services can help founders, we work together. When they can’t, we support them in whatever way we can, including cheering them on from a distance. That’s the amazing thing about focusing on climate tech – we’re all working toward a common goal.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.allelodesign.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allelo-design/