The behavioural bridge

Why small shifts win over big leaps in Experience Design

When I worked in marketing, I came up against the same issue many times:

In the desperation to create paradigm-shifting experiences that no one has ever seen before I was constantly asked to design experiences (apps, websites, campaigns) that went against the basics of how things worked in reality.

You know things like… technology. The internet. Or the human brain.

Existing things in a new way

This is because a marketing agency is all about creativity. And nothing must get in the way of those whose job it is to invent increasingly madder and madder nonsenses based on not-a-lot.

For example:

• The media owner that wanted to change the way users understood and consumed video in a way that disregarded all video player behaviour and existing and understood design patterns. Let alone accessibility.

• The campaign that asked people to buy things in a way that disregarded shopping baskets and check outs by.. not having them.

• The global CEO, who wanted banking to become fun, and cool and exciting in its UI until it looked like a marketing website because it would be "different "… Ignoring the entire psychology of financial application design, which is, of course, based on trust and authority and being vaguely sensible.

gen AI does “something shiny and new”

New things in a new way

Then there were the ideas that carried the most risk; asking users to do new things in new ways.

This is what I call the new-new.

• Let’s get people who have never given to charity before to donate using a newly invented payment method

• Let’s ask people who don’t do sports to run a marathon and track it on this new social network they’ve never heard of

This list could go on for a while, I’m going to stop myself..

This boiled my onions not because I’m an old stick-in-the-mud of UX (though there are days I feel I am) but because despite their having all the Behavioural Science departments and famous rotund chaps giving talks and shiny consulting suits in the world they missed one basic principle…

It’s really hard to get people to do new things in a new way, unless you spend some time Designing It Properly for a whole range of psychological triggers and existing behaviours.

And even then it might not work because hard things are hard.

Gen AI hallucination on the prompt “habits”. Yep, I’ve no idea either.

Why is it so hard to create new habits within new experiences

This is not to say such things cannot be designed. It is just that you have to design around all of the human biases and resistances that we already know about, rather than ignoring science as an inconvenience to your creativity.

We have to accept something - that radically new behaviours often fail because they demand too much from the user.

In the rampant appeal of groundbreaking innovation, there is a gap between a person’s vision and actual user psychology.

Users have an implicit contract with existing products/services – they understand how things work, and they're comfortable with that.

This is why one of the standard heuristics of UX (Jakobs Law) states that users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

Existing human psychology is going to get in the way

There are many existing psychological models and theories and stubborn user behaviours that come into play when you design the new-new.

The Power of Habit (and The Habit Loop)

Existing habits govern existing user behaviour. They operate in response to a cue, leading to an action, leading to a reward. Habits once established are automatic.

When we try to introduce a completely new behaviour, we're asking users to build an entirely new habit loop from scratch – a cognitively intensive process.

e.g. hard for Mr Brain.

The burden of cognitive load

Cognitive load is about how hard we are asking the user’s brain to work, and how much more load our particular experience or task is asking their brain to handle.

The brain seeks efficiency so if it’s too much work, our experience or task is going to get binned.

Upsetting the status quo

Humans are lazy. The human brain is lazy. Humans have an inherent preference for things to remain as they are, and change can be seen as ‘loss’.

Things that are new-new often directly triggers status quo bias. Users see a new experience as a threat to their comfortable existing routine.

The Power of Familiarity

Familiarity or the mere exposure effect is our tendency to prefer things we've been exposed to repeatedly.

Users already have a degree of comfort and preference for their existing behaviours due to mere exposure.

Gen AI does bridge building

So how do you do it?

“We must design for the way people behave, not for how we would wish them to behave.”

- Don Norman, Living with complexity

Let me introduce what I call The Behavioural Bridge Principle.

It is significantly easier to change the way someone does something within an existing behaviour, than create a completely new behaviour and then try to make them do something different within that.

This principle offers a more effective, human-centric approach to driving user adoption.

Building a behavioural bridge

Needless to say, I’m assuming that if you’re reading this you are a UX flavoured human who understands the basics of User-Centred Design and will follow some kind of design thinking or double diamond or other systematic approach to design that involves user research.

Right?

OK. So within that methodology, there are now additional things to consider in understanding your user base, defining desired behavioural outcomes and choice architecture, and choosing your final interactions and design patterns.

They are as follows: