We Design for Behaviour, but We Rarely Design for Experience

Most companies genuinely believe they design their websites for people. They hire behavioural scientists, study user journeys and optimize flows based on what people tend to click, skip or avoid. The intention is to make the experience feel intuitive and to support the path to conversion, and in many cases it does exactly that.

But there is an interesting tension that keeps coming up for me. Most modern digital experiences are built around human behaviour, not human experience. Behaviour is predictable. Experience is emotional. Behaviour gets you the click. Experience earns you the trust.

When teams optimize for behaviour, they focus on the things that are easy to measure: clicks, scroll depth, funnel progression, micro conversions and attention. But clarity, transparency, consent, control and emotional ease are also human needs. These are harder to quantify and often get sidelined because the dashboards do not show them.

Companies are not ignoring the human experience because they do not care. They ignore it because it is hard to measure. And in a world run by KPIs, we naturally focus on what is visible. The result is a strange gap. We end up with websites that guide behaviour beautifully but do not always respect understanding. They convert efficiently but do not necessarily build relationships. They respond to our habits but not always to our needs.

It makes me wonder what would happen if we treated the human experience with the same seriousness that we treat optimization metrics. And more importantly, what it would look like if we created a simple, public way to measure it.

#TheDataHuman #HumanCentredDesign #HumanCentredData #CustomerExperience #MarketingEthics