‘I want to break free’: supporting creativity in the design process for transformative customer experiences

Transformative customer experiences (CX) are emerging as the newest wave of experiential value. Novel and unexpected stimuli tend to foster transformations – thereby placing pressure on experience designers to generate new concepts within a business’ experiential portfolio. This study explores how the design process can be creatively framed to support collaborators in overcoming status-quo bias and enable concept generation for this CX type. We use a traditionally risk-averse service environment (higher education) and draw upon design reasoning to develop and test three distinctive creative frames (ways of looking at a problem) to support transformative CX design in this context. Post-workshop participant interviews (n = 29) found that abstract creative approaches enable paradigm stretching and paradigm breaking concept generation. Concrete approaches support paradigm preserving CX innovation.