Take the Desire Paths. Make Them Better.
By: Justin Owings
Tags: UX, Web Design, Developer, Web Development, Design

While the idea of shopping by chat may feel foreign to many in the U.S., it’s native behavior to many in China.

Separately, there’s the trend to “chatbot all the things.” Here, messaging can be seen as a way for users to interact with a business however they choose, and if the chatbot works, users build their desire path on-the-fly.

And a third messaging-related example is chat-based customer support services (like Intercom). When users feel the marked paths leave them feeling lost with no clear way to go, these services give them a paved path toward getting answers.

Smartphones — desire path engines.

Smartphones exploded in popularity because they paved the path that previous connected devices were only lightly facilitating — that is, browsing the Internet.

Before the iPhone, using OTA messaging services, taking and sharing photos, etc., in feature phones like the Blackberry Curve, while possible, was clunky and painful. The experience for users felt bolted-on instead of native.

The iPhone (and Android) paved the desire path for using mobile Internet by making it the prime function of the phone.

Once that path was paved — access and functionality on mobile — smartphone platforms became the wide open greens that facilitate a near limitless potential for desire paths.

Taking it even further, you can see apps as paved desire paths for what users would otherwise do on a browser. And today, as smartphones get more sensors, faster connections, and more processing power, the frontier of mobile grows.

Twitter and Instagram — streams of constraints and desire.

Twitter is a study in constraints and desire.

Hashtags and at replies were early desire paths that users carved into the Twittersphere that Twitter ultimately made native to the platform.

Image-sharing is another example. Twitter didn’t build in this functionality so users created the desire paths — sharing links to image-sharing services to work around the problem. That desire path got paved when Twitter brought the functionality in-house but it arguably happened too late — a separate image sharing service had paved it better.

Meet Instagram.

Or look at Twitter’s character limit. While it’s not going away, Twitter users can easily circumvent the character limits using images. If you want to share more than 140 characters — say you want to share a quote from an article or a book or you wrote a note on your phone — simply do a screenshot on your phone and share that.

Shifting to Instagram. Here’s a platform where image sharing is primary. Smartphones exploded in popularity because they paved the path that earlier devices were only lightly facilitating — that is, browsing the Internet.and text secondary. Many social media influencers (e.g. celebrities) have amassed huge Instagram followings and use Instagram as their primary channel.

So what do these influencers do when they have something to say on Instagram? Like on Twitter, they screenshot their phones — either a written note or whatever — and share that⁴.

Benedict Evans has pointed to screenshots on phones as desire paths to fill unmet needs within apps.

(Benedict Evans likens screenshots as a catch-all for lots of emerging desire paths)

Other examples of Instagram paving desire paths abound — from collages to carousels to (arguably) co-opting Snapchat’s story functionality.

Google.

Google is a desire path paving machine. Where do you want to go? Google takes you there — “10 blue links” that get you from Point A to B in milliseconds.

Google is well-known for paving desire paths.

No search required: Google auto-completes the query.

For example, Google has started surfacing the answers right in the search engine results page requiring no further work on the part of users — as is the case with Knowledge Graph cards.

In some cases, Google surfacing quotes from top results for a query has dramatically impacted the downstream websites from which the answers came.

Another example of Google paving a desire path is when the answer to a query surfaces right there in the auto-suggest box — before you even execute the search!

The Internet is a massive green space across which desire paths are being cut all the time, in apps, devices, and websites.

What other examples can you think of?

Desire paths and web design.

For a long time web developers had no way to see how users behaved on their site. Outcomes could be measured using analytical services (e.g. Google Analytics), but actually seeing where users are going and intuiting what they’re trying to do in any given situation was near impossible.

That’s why FullStory session replay is so powerful — it reveals where the “paved sidewalk” (a web site’s layout, app UX/UI, whatever) isn’t working as intended as well as visualizing, literally where the users are trying to go. Using session replay to see user flows helps developers and designers improve them.

It’s a little known fact that the original code name for FullStory was CowPaths.

Separately from surfacing user desire paths, FullStory also helps with the desire paths of designers, product managers, and engineers — by allowing them to search user interactions for whatever behavior they need to understand. What users click a certain button? Use a certain feature? Abandon their cart or get lost in your knowledge base? Just search it.

Just as much Google search is a desire path paving engine for bringing users to the world’s information, FullStory provides that power for an organizations’ user interactions on their web app.

With or without a service like FullStory, understanding a user’s desire paths on your site can make the difference between success and failure. No business is immune to the constraints on time and attention for users — getting them from point A to point B on your site so they can do whatever it is they’re trying to do — well, that’s our job as builders of products and services.

And it helps to mind the desire paths.

The desire path you’re on.

We all make plans, but life happens, anyway. Desire paths result.

Instead of relegating ourselves to plodding down the same desire paths we’ve walked countless times before, perhaps it’s time to make them better — whether in business, in design, or in life.

What desire paths do you take? What paths have you paved? Where is the path now on taking you?