What role should behaviour play in design reasoning in the first place?
I think about this question a lot. Most of my career has, in one way or another, been an attempt to get closer to it.
It sounds subtle. Perhaps even obvious. But the more closely I look, the more I think there is something unresolved here.
Existing design practice explains some of it. Adjacent disciplines explain more. But there is still a judgement at the centre of the work: what human behaviour does this design depend on, and how much confidence should we place in it?
The actions your service depends on
Services often rely on a handful of human actions to make the whole thing work. An audit of 14 design artefacts looks at whether our maps make those dependencies visible enough to judge them properly.
An experience is longer than the screen
A digital product may only occupy a few minutes of an experience that unfolds over days or weeks. Following the work people do before, between and after the screens can reveal the dependencies, recovery work and hidden effort that decide whether the experience succeeds.