Chapter 5. Experience Builds on Experience: Prior Analogous Experience

Familiarity is a free asset, but it comes bundled with promises.

Suppose we borrow one familiar icon: five rating stars, a Play button, or a shopping cart. An ordinary person reads the screen through the other promises attached to those shapes. Stars create an expectation of “reviews I can trust”; a Play button creates an expectation of “free.” We thought we had borrowed only a shape. What the user received was a promise we never intended to keep.

How do people judge an unfamiliar screen so quickly?

When a tall vertical video plays, they swipe upward with a thumb without being told. When a gear appears in the upper-right corner, they trust that settings are there. When a number sits inside a red circle, they take it to mean that many unread items have accumulated. Nobody remembers being taught these things separately, yet everyone knows them.

Chapter 1 said that users do not arrive empty-handed. This chapter turns that fact into an asset. Before users open our game, their minds are already packed with hundreds of screens, controls, and promises. We can borrow them for free, or unknowingly violate them and pay the price. Chapter 6 asks who owns those hands; here, we first examine what they are holding.

“Anything that looks like YouTube is expected to be free.” This book repeats that sentence. A Play-shaped triangle, a wide thumbnail, and a recommendation list extending downward: when users see something with this shape, they do not expect to pay, because YouTube was free. A single shape has already set the price tag. First-experience design therefore begins by reading this unconscious expectation.

A Character-Collection Index That Needs No Explanation

Let us follow one hypothetical game all the way through. It is the mobile game used throughout this book: users meet characters in short videos, collect them, and talk with them. The game has an “index” screen showing the characters collected so far.

The planning team’s first draft was clean and original. Characters appeared as circular nodes connected by lines, forming an image like a constellation. The design meeting praised its freshness. But when it entered new-user testing, people stopped in front of the screen, stared at the dots and lines, and finally asked, “What do you do here?” The beautiful picture created a question.

The second draft went in the opposite direction. It divided the screen into a grid. Characters not yet collected remained as black silhouettes in empty spaces, while collecting one filled its space with a color illustration. This time nobody asked. The moment people saw the screen, their hands moved first: “Oh, I just need to fill all these empty spaces.” The goal was communicated without a single line of explanation.

What changed? The second draft resembled the Pokédex. More precisely, it borrowed the promise of “filling empty spaces,” refined over decades not only by Pokémon but by sticker books, stamp albums, photo albums, and countless collection interfaces in games. Users already know that promise in their bodies. Empty spaces exist to be filled; filling them is satisfying; filling them all means completion. One familiar shell replaced an entire page of tutorial.

The same promise works outside games. Fill a row with stars in a coffee app and receive a free drink. Leave stamp spaces empty, and people will buy one more cup just to fill them. Duolingo’s single flame, representing a streak of consecutive study days and urging users not to break it, is another variation on the same promise. It is widely observed that many people open the app every day because they do not want to lose even one day of that flame. The desire to fill an empty space and the desire not to break a completed line are not gamer traits. They are prior experiences everyone carries. Our index has climbed aboard this well-worn promise.

The same thing happens in MEJE Aidong World. The screen where a fan meets and customizes an Aidong—a puppy resembling their favorite idol—is a new feature, but not a new experience for that fan. They have already collected photo cards of their favorite, decorated journals and phones around them, kept up with their videos on social media, and collected merchandise. Choosing the Aidong’s ears, coloring it, and placing it by their side are actions already held in those hands. We are not teaching customization. We are simply asking fans to perform inside our world the customization they already know.

The User Is Not a Blank Sheet

Let us stop one familiar assumption here. New users are often called a “blank slate”: a clean sheet that knows nothing, on which we must draw everything from the beginning. It sounds considerate, but it is wrong. The user is not blank but a sheet already densely written upon. Whatever we write is written over text that was there first.

This book calls what is already written on that sheet prior analogous experience: a bundle of expectations users formed before arriving at our game by encountering similar shapes, controls, and rewards in other media. Some arrive from YouTube and short-form video, others from social media, webtoons, messaging, shopping malls, fandom, other games, or offline experiences such as theme parks. Each point of origin brings different expectations.

Dividing those expectations into four branches makes design clearer: what expectation each medium brings, what we can borrow from it, what experiential price that medium has set, and what taboo we must not casually break.

Take someone arriving from short-form video. Their expectation is “When I release my finger, the next item appears on its own.” What we can borrow is autoplay and immediacy. The price set by that medium is close to zero; videos arrived endlessly for free. The taboo is waiting. To eyes trained by short-form video, a three-second load feels like thirty seconds and an unskippable intro like thirty years. To retain this person, the first screen must show something as quickly as short-form video does.

Someone arriving from webtoons is different. Their expectation is “Swipe upward and the story continues.” We can borrow vertical scrolling and the rhythm of presentation; the price is a light commitment of roughly one episode. The taboo is interruption. If a horizontal tutorial pop-up jumps out while a reader is immersed and scrolling downward, their first reaction is irritation at the broken story.

Someone arriving from commerce differs again. Their expectation is “Compare, read reviews, then decide,” so they are deliberate and suspicious at once. We can borrow trust mechanisms such as star ratings, reviews, and rankings, but this person does not give every review the same weight. That is why Amazon places a “Verified Purchase” mark beside reviews. It distinguishes the words of someone who truly bought and used the product from words written without a purchase. Commerce-trained users are already accustomed to looking for such “verified traces,” so when our screen displays character popularity or user opinions, it must be legible as the trace of a real person. Yet the same trust mechanism also operates as a taboo. If we present a payment window the moment they arrive, it is judged as coldly as a shopping-site checkout: “Do I really need to buy this?” comes first.

Let us make one thing clear. Borrowing prior analogous experience does not mean copying another game’s screen. We borrow not pixels but expectations in the user’s mind. Our index need not look identical to the Pokédex. It needs only to borrow the promise “fill the empty spaces” with precision. Dressing the same promise in our own shell is the boundary between imitation and borrowing.

What Do We Borrow, and What Do We Make New?

With so much familiarity available to borrow, making everything familiar would turn the product into a copy of another game. The user would have no reason to choose us. The essential first-experience decision therefore narrows to one question: what will we borrow to reduce explanation, and what will we make new so that we remain ourselves?

The rule is simple. Borrow the grammar of controls and screens from familiar places, then focus all the user’s attention on one genuinely new thing that only we can provide. The borrowed shell erases explanation and frees cognitive budget; spend that remaining budget on a single novelty. Make three things familiar and one unfamiliar. To be clear, the ratio of three to one is rhetorical. The principle is that there should be only one new thing. A person’s cognitive budget is already tight when absorbing one novelty; the number three has no special evidentiary basis. Familiarity is neither an enemy that must always be broken nor a correct answer that must always be followed. It is a knife that separates the assets we borrow from the weapon we newly provide.

Borrowing also has a trap. When we borrow a familiar shape, the medium’s expectations follow wholesale. Borrow five rating stars and the expectation “reviews I can trust” comes with them. Fill the space with praise that looks fake, and trust breaks instantly. Borrow a Play button and the expectation “free” follows. Demand payment the moment it is pressed, and the expectation returns as betrayal. A borrowed shape carries a borrowed promise. If we cannot keep the promise, it is better not to borrow the shape.

There is an asymmetry hidden here. Breaking a borrowed promise is worse than never making the promise at all. Users experience it not as absence but as betrayal, so fake praise beneath star ratings erodes more trust than a screen with no stars. But the same asymmetry works in the opposite direction. Deliberately overfulfill a borrowed promise, and the difference becomes free delight. Give more than free atop the “free” expectation carried by a Play button. Add an unexpected handful on top of the tactile satisfaction promised by an empty space. When choosing which promises to borrow, then, the cheapest first delight comes from borrowing promises we can deliberately overfulfill, not merely keep.

Not every borrowed familiarity has the same weight. Divide them once more and they fall into three kinds: conventions to borrow unchanged, conventions whose shape we borrow while replacing the interior, and conventions to discard entirely. Borrow bodily known promises such as vertical scrolling and filling empty spaces unchanged. Do not borrow conventions that make our users feel resistance from the outset. The middle category—borrowing the shape while replacing what is inside—is the most difficult.

Put leveling up and daily attendance at the checkpoint. Ask four questions. First, what does this convention take for granted? Both rest on the promise “rewards accumulate when you repeat something diligently,” a promise gamers learned in their bodies through RPGs and online games. Second, do ordinary people share that premise? No. Why a level number should rise, or why logging in daily to collect a stamp should count as a reward, are rules never promised to someone who has not played games. Third, what experiential price does it charge? Daily attendance charges a sense of obligation—“If I do not enter, I lose out”—making the game feel like debt rather than fun. A level number adds one more meaningless symbol to the first screen. Fourth, what replaces it? Borrow the shape but replace the interior. In place of the shell “a number rises,” put a reward our world can genuinely provide, such as “the character grows closer to me.” Borrow the tactile pleasure of filling an empty space unchanged, but replace the contents of that space with our own.

An attentive reader may challenge us here. We just praised Duolingo’s flame as a well-worn promise, yet both a streak and daily attendance operate through the same loss-aversion mechanism. Why condemn daily attendance as debt? The criterion is the direction of ownership. A streak is a record users accumulated through their own behavior; the system helps preserve it from being broken. What they do not want to lose is a history they created. A daily-attendance reward, by contrast, is bait hung up unilaterally by the system. It is not something the user built but something the system waves, and what they lose by not arriving is not their own history but a giveaway somebody else promised. Even under the same loss aversion, the step taken to protect my record feels different from the step drawn toward someone else’s bait. Only the latter smells like debt. Add this question when judging a borrowed convention: is the thing they fear losing something the user built, or something we hung up?

One point must not be forgotten. People arriving from existing games also carry a bundle of prior experience, and that familiarity can become misunderstanding rather than help. They have spent incomparably more time in other apps and games than in ours. They therefore assume our screen will work “the usual way,” and stumble hardest exactly where we deliberately changed it. Turn this fact around and the illusion of designer sovereignty breaks. YouTube, webtoons, and messengers have already delivered most of your game’s tutorial. You rent most of your screen grammar from other companies, and the rent is fulfillment of the promises it carries.

Users also write in advance what will come next. Let us use psychology’s long-established name for this prediction: a script. A video makes them expect the next video, an empty space the reward of filling it, and a level-up screen a stronger next round. The shell we borrow carries this script with it. We must therefore prepare the scene users expect to follow the borrowed screen. Show an empty space and soon return the tactile satisfaction of filling it. If that satisfaction is absent, we have broken the borrowed promise.

▶ Three Questions to Apply to Your Screen

Am I keeping the promises that accompanied the familiarity I borrowed?

Have I decided whether to borrow this convention unchanged, borrow only its shape and modify it, or discard it entirely?

Do ordinary people truly share the convention I believe is familiar?

If even one question stops you, that familiarity operates as a trap rather than an asset.

Reference Content

Examples from other media that reveal the concepts in this chapter.

Video Games

The museum index in Animal Crossing: uncollected fish, insects, and fossils leave display spaces empty; donations fill them. Even a first-time user reads the goal “fill every empty space” without explanation.

General Apps

Starbucks star rewards: the promise of filling stamp spaces to receive a free drink works outside games in exactly the same way.
Duolingo’s learning-streak flame: a single flame visualizes the loss aversion of not wanting to lose accumulated days. It is widely observed that many people open the app every day because they do not want to lose a long streak.

Webtoons

Vertically scrolling serials: people arriving from webtoons know in their bodies the promise that swiping upward continues the story.

Commerce / Real-World Workflows

Amazon’s “Verified Purchase” badge: labels are attached only to reviews by people who actually bought the product, distinguishing real traces for commerce-trained users who do not give every review the same weight.

The remaining reference content is collected in the “Chapter 5 Appendix” at the end of this chapter. (In the printed book, it is grouped into Appendix D.)

Design Note ▶ Try It Yourself

At the end of Chapter 1, you wrote a “list of twenty familiarities.” Now look again only at the items marked borrow.

Choose one item and write three lines. Which medium did this familiarity come from? What one-sentence expectation does the user carry from there? Can we actually keep that expectation, or would it be better not to borrow it?

If the third line says “We cannot keep it,” the familiarity is a trap, not an asset. Remove it instead of borrowing it.

Add one more line: Will we keep that promise unchanged in our game, borrow only the shape and replace the interior, or discard it entirely? Which of the three you mark determines whether borrowed familiarity becomes an asset or a misunderstanding.

This exercise grows into Appendix A’s “Prior Analogous Experience Borrowing Table” (medium × expectation × what to borrow × risk). Chapter 10 crosses it once more by character through the question “Where did the people who will like this character come from?”

For every shape borrowed, check whether you can keep its promise. If you cannot, remove the shape.

In one sentence: Users are not blank sheets but sheets already densely written upon. Divide the expectations they bring from other media by medium—expectation, what to borrow, price, and taboo—then borrow controls and screens to erase explanation and concentrate attention on one genuinely new thing. But borrowed shapes carry borrowed promises, so do not borrow a promise you cannot keep. Next chapter: We have decided what to borrow. Who, then, receives it? We move to the idea that a user who appears to be one person actually exists across several layers.

Chapter 5 Appendix: Reference Content Collection

This collection examines Chapter 5’s tool across several media: dividing the prior analogous experiences users bring from other media into expectations, what to borrow, prices, and taboos, then checking whether we can keep the promises attached to borrowed shapes. It is grouped into video games; mobile, apps, and services; video, comics, and music; and offline and everyday life. Pair every case with the chapter’s borrowing checkpoint—borrow unchanged, borrow the shape only, or discard—and ask: Where did this familiarity come from? What does it promise? What betrayal follows if we break it?

Video Games

Standard FPS controls in Doom (2016): the game accepts the WASD and mouse-look habits of people who have played other first-person shooters, erasing control explanations. What to examine: the basic form of borrowing, which reduces explanation cost to zero by retaining a genre standard, along with the limit that it erases nothing for someone who does not know that standard.
Spec Ops: The Line: this 2012 game borrows the familiar grammar of an ordinary military shooter to establish expectations, then betrays them head-on in the white-phosphorus sequence to create shock. What to examine: borrowing as a tool of direction beyond saving explanation, where the shock of betrayal is proportional to the scale of the borrowed familiarity.
Circle-to-confirm and X-to-cancel on Japanese PlayStation systems: this platform standard ran opposite to Western editions. When the PS5 standardized X-to-confirm even in Japan, the most deeply trained habits stumbled hardest. What to examine: habits established by a platform remain in the body regardless of the user’s will, making the moment a standard changes the most dangerous moment.
Virtual joysticks in mobile games: a control method that draws a console controller’s stick on a touchscreen. It is free familiarity to someone who has used a controller, but a foreign language requiring separate study for someone who has never held one. What to examine: the same borrowing can be an asset or a burden depending on point of origin, so first ask who is the subject of “familiar.”

Mobile / Apps / Services

Right swipe in a dating app: a gesture popularized by one app acquired the meaning “like, select,” allowing shopping, job-search, and language-learning apps to borrow the promise unchanged. What to examine: how quickly a gesture made by one product becomes an industry lingua franca, and how its original context—intuitive like-or-dislike judgment—is borrowed with it.
Pull to refresh: a gesture often said to have spread from an early Twitter app propagated across apps and became a standard, turning into screen grammar everyone knows without remembering being taught. What to examine: the chapter’s rental metaphor—that most screen grammar was taught by somebody else—through one of the most deeply ingrained gestures.
Skeuomorphism in early iOS: the Notes app’s yellow legal pad, iBooks’ wooden bookshelf, and Game Center’s green felt borrowed the forms of physical objects so people who had used them could immediately read the screen. What to examine: borrowing can originate from real-world objects rather than another app, and after everyone became familiar with screens, the borrowing aged into kitsch and was discarded.
The floppy-disk Save icon: floppy disks disappeared long ago, yet the Save button keeps their shape. Even generations that have never seen the object inherit only the promise “this shape means Save.” What to examine: signs can outlive their original objects, and prior analogous experience accumulates through screen experience as well as physical experience.
The hamburger menu: the three-line menu icon is standard among makers, but analyses have found that hiding a menu inside it lowers discovery and use among ordinary users. What to examine: the app-design version of the genre curse—the assumption that a promise shared only among makers is common knowledge for everyone.

Video / Comics / Music

Tournament arcs in boys’ comics: the single-elimination structure moves through increasingly powerful opponents while displaying new characters and growth, so readers can predict the next development merely by seeing the bracket. What to examine: a structure that reduces explanation by borrowing the script in the reader’s mind—the predicted next scene—while the moment that prediction is slightly twisted produces the greatest fun.
The promised opening of regression and villainess-transmigration stories: the protagonist uses foreknowledge of the original plot to avoid catastrophe, so readers begin the first scene with the script “The protagonist knows the future and will change fate.” What to examine: genre grammar becoming a bundle of prior analogous experiences that reduces the explanatory cost of Episode 1 almost to zero.
Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah”: borrowing Leonard Cohen’s 1984 song, Buckley changed the verse selection and arrangement to create an interpretation evaluated alongside the original. What to examine: the balance of what is borrowed—the song—and what is newly given—the interpretation—at the boundary where borrowing a shape while changing its interior becomes creation rather than imitation.
Genre conventions—the promised scenes of Westerns and film noir: they borrow audience expectations to reduce explanation, and deliberately diverging from them creates freshness. What to examine: conventions remain assets even at the moment they are broken, with the condition that the freshness works only for audiences who know the convention.
The opening sequence after a cold open: viewers know in advance the order in which a strong first scene is followed by the title and opening, and prepare for the next scene according to that script. What to examine: when users already know what comes next, meeting the prediction becomes comfort in itself.
The opening montage in Pixar’s Up: compressing a couple’s life into a little over four nearly wordless minutes creates in advance the emotional foundation through which the audience reads every action in the main story. What to examine: a work making its own prior experience for the main story to rely on—if there is no experience to borrow, it can be created within the opening minutes.
Scream: Wes Craven’s 1996 horror film assumes the audience’s genre knowledge so thoroughly that its characters recite horror-movie rules aloud, then twists those expectations from the opening scene to create shock. What to examine: borrowed conventions remain assets even when twisted, along with the limit that the twist does not work for an audience unfamiliar with them.

Offline / Everyday Life

Build-A-Bear Workshop: customers stuff a toy themselves, dress it, and even make a birth certificate, drawing out greater affection for something made with their own hands. What to examine: the construction of borrowing two experiences customers already know—playing with dolls and adoption paperwork—and weaving them into a single store journey.
Dice, pieces, and moving across spaces: borrowing the basic grammar of board games that everyone knows lets players focus on one new rule. What to examine: the chapter’s principle “three familiar, one unfamiliar” as a long-standing fundamental of board-game design.
Power symbols, Play triangles, and two-line Pause icons: promises that work across devices and can be read immediately even on an unfamiliar appliance. What to examine: symbols standardized across media and devices are the cheapest borrowing assets, so using one for another meaning is the most expensive mistake.
Everyday conventions such as hot water on the left and cold on the right: violating a bodily ingrained promise makes even an everyday object confusing. What to examine: no matter how minor the violation, the user pays the cost each time, so the price of breaking convention is billed repeatedly.
The QWERTY keyboard: a layout solidified in the typewriter era persists onto smartphone screens despite alternatives promoted as more efficient. Whether those alternatives truly were more efficient remains disputed after later rebuttals. What to examine: the strength of prior-experience inertia and what a new grammar lacks when it cannot defeat familiarity.
Traffic-light color conventions: the promise “red means stop, green means go” crossed from roads to screens, so red error messages and green confirmation buttons are read fastest. What to examine: the largest archetype of a promise borrowed across media, and why users hesitate before a screen that violates it, such as a red confirmation button.