Module 01: The Psychology of Interfaces – Week 3

🧠 Custom Reading: Beyond Funnels — Designing with Behavior Chains

✴️ Introduction

In UX and product design, we’re constantly told to “optimize the funnel.” But when we reduce user behavior to a series of linear steps with conversion at the end, we oversimplify the human experience. Funnels were never meant to describe how people behave — they were meant to describe how marketers wish they behaved.

Behavior chains offer a more psychologically realistic, productively nuanced model. This shift — from funnel thinking to behavioral thinking — isn’t just semantic. It’s foundational.

🔍 The Origins of Funnel Thinking

The marketing funnel, also known as AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action), dates back to the late 19th century. It was formally introduced by Elias St. Elmo Lewis, a pioneering adman and writer. Its simplicity and clarity made it a staple in sales training and later in digital marketing analytics.

But this model carries a number of assumptions:

• User attention is linear and predictable
• Each step is sequential and universal
• Drop-off is failure rather than information
• All users travel the same path to the same outcome

These assumptions may have worked in traditional sales environments, but digital product behavior is dynamic, circular, and often self-directed.

📖 Source:

• Lewis, E. St. Elmo. "Financial Advertising." Business Publisher, 1908.
• A Brief History of the Marketing Funnel – Mailchimp