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https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited>
'If you've ever read about design, you've probably encountered the idea of
"paving the desire path." A "desire path" is an erosion path created by people
departing from the official walkway and taking their own route. The story goes
that smart campus planners don't fight the desire paths laid down by students;
they pave them, formalizing the route that their constituents have voted for
with their feet.
Desire paths aren't always great (Wikipedia notes that "desire paths sometimes
cut through sensitive habitats and exclusion zones, threatening wildlife and
park security"), but in the context of design, a desire path is a way that
users communicate with designers, creating a feedback loop between those two
groups. The designers make a product, the users use it in ways that surprise
the designer, and the designer integrates all that into a new revision of the
product.
This method is widely heralded as a means of "co-innovating" between users and
companies. Designers who practice the method are lauded for their humility,
their willingness to learn from their users. Tech history is strewn with
examples of successful paved desire-paths.
Take John Deere. While today the company is notorious for its war on its
customers (via its opposition to right to repair), Deere was once a leader in
co-innovation, dispatching roving field engineers to visit farms and learn how
farmers had modified their tractors. The best of these modifications would then
be worked into the next round of tractor designs, in a virtuous cycle:
https://securityledger.com/2019/03/opinion-my-grandfathers-john-deere-would-support-our-right-to-repair/
But this pattern is even more pronounced in the digital world, because it's
much easier to update a digital service than it is to update all the tractors
in the field, especially if that service is cloud-based, meaning you can modify
the back-end everyone is instantly updated. The most celebrated example of this
co-creation is Twitter, whose users created a host of its core features.
Retweets, for example, were a user creation. Users who saw something they liked
on the service would type "RT" and paste the text and the link into a new tweet
composition window. Same for quote-tweets: users copied the URL for a tweet and
pasted it in below their own commentary. Twitter designers observed this user
innovation and formalized it, turning it into part of Twitter's core
feature-set.
Companies are obsessed with discovering digital desire paths. They pay fortunes
for analytics software to produce maps of how their users interact with their
services, run focus groups, even embed sneaky screen-recording software into
their web-pages:
https://www.wired.com/story/the-dark-side-of-replay-sessions-that-record-your-every-move-online/
This relentless surveillance of users is pursued in the name of making things
better for them: let us spy on you and we'll figure out where your pain-points
and friction are coming from, and remove those. We all win!
But this impulse is a world apart from the humility and respect implied by
co-innovation. The constant, nonconsensual observation of users has more to do
with controlling users than learning from them.'
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
