Gentle Experiences: How Gentle Experience Design Encourages Positive Behaviour

Gentle Experience Design and narratives can shape how our target audience perceives visual elements, and whether or not they should adapt their behaviors accordingly

"We must design for the way people behave, not for the way we wish them to behave." - Don Norman.

This was a statement I came across on the Nielsen Norman Group website earlier this week, while studying healthcare UX—a domain I am greatly interested in.

I also came across another statement on the same website: "Watching users' actual behaviour helps us gain insights to improve the user behaviour."

When I read these statements, I thought, "We are designing based on the users' existing behaviour, not designing to improve their behaviour, are we?"

When we design an experience based on existing human behaviour—derived from sufficient and comprehensive research, we keep mental models in mind so our users can quickly familiarise themselves with our system's functionality.

However, if we only design based on existing behaviour, there would be little to no innovation in our experience design endeavours. Designing around existing behaviour is essential because it respects users’ existing mental models. But thoughtful experiences can also gently expand those mental models over time.

Take the example of aged users. Many experience speech, vision, and motor difficulties. As experience designers, we observe how they interact with our designs, study their behaviour, and then return with an improved experience that would help them perform their tasks more easily.

At the same time, we would want to help them grow confident in using advanced features that may be difficult to learn, yet immensely helpful if they do.

To do this, we craft gentle experiences that encourage subtle growth and learning for our older users so they can become attuned to these advanced features, all while keeping their existing behaviour patterns in mind.

And over time, if done carefully and without overwhelming them, help them become more confident using our digital solutions.

Gentle Experience Design is the process of designing experiences that help users gradually expand their existing mental models and behaviours through subtle encouragement, accessible guidance, and solutions tailored to their needs—ultimately fostering confidence, adaptability, and long-term engagement.

An example

Take a standard reading application that helps users track what books they read and list the books they want to read. Younger users may be able to track their reading progress, update page numbers, and perhaps even add a journal entry chronicling their takeaways from a passage.

Aged users, on the other hand, may not be able to use some of these functions due to accessibility problems or usability difficulties, which could in turn prevent them from using a reading tracker app. Experience designers take note of this, and they iterate their designs to accommodate aged users.

Perhaps they will include a feature where this unique user group can take pictures of the books they read, and an AI-native feature can search the book online and add it to their digital bookshelf for them. The designers might also incorporate voice-activated features that might help these users record their thoughts on a passage, which can then be translated into text format and recorded as a journal entry in the app.

By enabling these inclusive features, our aged users are likely to develop a change in their behavior towards reading tracker apps. Instead of being discouraged by them, they start using them frequently, and, as they develop new mental models and confidence, they are less likely to disregard other reading tracker apps, as they are bound to expect a similar experience.

In this way, experience designers have improved existing behavior by not disregarding user needs and abilities.

Interrelation to Comics

Interestingly, this concept of improving behaviour extends beyond digital product design. Visual storytelling mediums like comics also shape reader behaviour over time.

In the past, comics often consisted of standard square or rectangular panels that repeated throughout the comic book. There weren't many dynamic panel renderings that amplified emotion or movement in the visual storytelling.

                                                    

In the example above, taken from The Uncanny X-Men #129 (1980), the panels are all square or rectangular. This was a panel style common at the time.

Over time, this changed. We now see comic books using dynamic panels that capture the movement of time within space, thereby amplifying the narrative and aiding in reader immersion. This is not to say that non-dynamic panels are not used at this present age—they still are, but use cases vary according to the narrative.

If dynamic panel styles had been introduced abruptly back then, it could have caused confusion and bewilderment among readers, as they were accustomed to seeing a particular style in the visual narrative at that time.

Comic book artists and writers helped improve reader reception and behaviour by carefully introducing dynamic panels, which are now widely accepted and seen as visual amplifiers. Furthermore, readers no longer feel confused if such stylised panels are used wisely, as their comic-reading behaviour has already adapted to those styles.

So, do I think we can improve existing behaviours? I believe we can as long as we have our users’ and readers’ good in mind, without compromising on their existing behaviours and mental models.

The most meaningful innovations are often the ones that guide people forward without making them feel left behind.

Your turn

What are your impressions on improving user and reader behaviors through gentle experience design? Have you ever worked on a project where you had to resist just designing for existing behaviors?

Let me know in the comments!