This month's Frame: using Schechner’s “restored behaviour” to capitalise on innovative interactions
A framework to help teams seize opportunities in new user behaviours.
In tech, it’s easy to treat behaviour as a means to an end: a “swipe” that leads to a match, a like button that signals emotion, a “pull down” to refresh new content. These actions are often discussed in terms of engagement or conversion. But over time, they settle into something more persistent. What begins as a small interaction becomes a learned behaviour, embedded into design systems, and repeated across products and contexts. After Tinder helped make the gesture popular, people swipe not just to choose a match, but to navigate stories, read news, or browse courses. Now not just constrained to Facebook posts, “likes” don’t just express genuine feeling, but acknowledge receipt, mark visibility, or even fulfil a social obligation.
Yet most product teams don’t see these behaviours as having the potential to spread through culture, often focusing on localised interactions rather than trying to chart the potential trajectory of how a behaviour might spread. Nobody anticipated what the “swipe” would do to how we navigate the digital world.
However, this presents two problems for product teams. Firstly, if design patterns can be adopted anywhere, their familiarity makes it easy for users to switch to a competitor. The second challenge is that behaviours that are not intentionally designed to create sustainable engagement can have the opposite effect: leading to users becoming disaffected with the product over time. For example, younger users leaving dating apps may be in part due to the binary yes/no attitude inculcated by the swipe.
The framework
To understand how behaviours travel, we can apply ideas from performance theorist Richard Schechner and his concept of “restored behaviour”. Originally developed in the analysis of ritual and theatre, restored behaviour refers to actions that are learned, rehearsed and repeated outside their original context. These are not spontaneous behaviours, they are detached from the circumstances in which they were performed, but carried forward into other areas of life. Schechner used this concept to explain how performances, rituals and social roles persist and circulate.
For example, a military drill used for training soldiers to march effectively might reappear during a victory parade. The soldiers are still moving in the same way, but the context and purpose is different. The behaviour is “restored” to a new symbolic purpose; instead of physical exercise, the soldiers are now making a “show of strength” to their audience. In the digital context, many will be familiar with the experience of a toddler trying to swipe a book, applying the behaviour learned on an iPad to a different form of media.
Digital environments are particularly good at training restored behaviours. Users engage in repeated actions that are reinforced through feedback loops, interface design, and social norms. Digital actions are frequently “restored” into different contexts because designers reference emergent design patterns to make their product feel familiar and easy to use.
While swiping was first popularised by dating apps like Tinder, the gesture has now become a familiar interaction pattern that has been restored again and again in different ways. What began as a way to say yes or no to a person has become a default way to navigate options of all sorts, extending into areas like shopping, media and entertainment. The gesture remains, but the decision-making behind it does not have the same meaning. “Swiping” has jumped not only from platform to platform, but into everyday parlance.
Common digital actions are restored behaviours in practice: patterns repeated across platforms, often detached from their original purpose, but no less influential. They shape how users interact—not just with one product, but across the entire digital ecosystem.
Using the framework
The concept of restored behaviour can guide product strategy in two powerful ways: offensively, to compete by welcoming and repurposing behaviours that were formed elsewhere, and defensively, to prevent losing users to competitors.
Offensive approach: rehome behaviours formed elsewhere
Product teams have rarely controlled restored behaviours, which can be hard to wrangle. But they can often be anticipated. If users are repeating a behaviour that no longer feels rewarding or aligned to the core job a product is doing, there’s an opportunity to rehome (or rescue) a behaviour by restoring it somewhere else that it feels better. Continuing the swipe example, products like Deepstash were built on the recognition that for some users, swiping was becoming negative “doomscrolling”. By rehoming the swipe gesture to products around learning instead of entertainment, the swipe is transformed into a path towards self-development.Defensive approach: make behaviours harder to leave behind
Whenever a product popularises a behaviour, it also opens the door for competitors to imitate that behaviour or rehome it as discussed above. To defend against this, product teams must go beyond inventing new interactions. They must ensure those interactions are part of an overall experience that leads towards beneficial and meaningful outcomes for the user. For example, users found it easy to switch to Bumble from Tinder as it used similar design patterns while promising an experience that prioritised lasting and meaningful relationships over hookups. Defending behavioural territory means embedding those behaviours in systems of real user value.
In treating behaviours as self-contained touchpoints to be measured and transformed into metrics for KPIs and OKRs, we miss the full potential and cultural force that behaviours have within society. As the saying goes, “we are what we repeatedly do”. Schechner’s idea of restored behaviour helps surface what’s often overlooked in product design: not just what users do, but what they repeat, and where that repetition travels—both digitally and beyond.
Interested in exploring similar topics further? Explore our archive of past Frames for fresh perspectives:
We have discussed the importance of surrounding a new behaviour with a generally positive product experience. For more detail on creating therapeutic products that avoid “digital fatigue”, refer to our recent piece on Stiegler’s pharmacological approach to technology.
Another important aspect of positive digital experiences is a sense of meaning, and that a user’s time is well-spent and not merely wasted. We explore this here, using ideas from the philosopher Byung-Chul Han to guide the creation of intentionally meaningful temporal experiences on digital platforms.
Designing new user behaviours from scratch requires a design process that truly innovates rather than merely evolves and adapts. Our piece exploring how best to use generative AI as part of a creative process provides guidance on how and why to do this.
Our Viewpoint on the true value of subscriptions for users contains a relevant discussion on how users can suffer from systemic fatigue and consequently seek to exert more agency over their experience.
Frames is a monthly newsletter that sheds light on the most important issues concerning business and technology.
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