Desire lines – the metaphor that keeps on giving
by petermeFive years ago I wrote about the burgeoning phenomenon of “tagging” content, and in it, I used the metaphor of the desire line — trails worn into a landscape that demonstrate the paths people want to take, not those that were laid down by the designer.
Last week I attended an industry smarty party in the form of Giga Om’s “What Comes Next For The Web” bunker session, where a bunch of leading thinkers and makers talk about where the Web is heading. The discussion lead by Adaptive Path founder and Typekit CEO Jeffrey Veen dealt with (surprise!) user experience, and the conversation lead toward the evolution of design practice in a Web 2.0 world. For instance, Doug Bowman, Creative Director of Twitter, talked about how he’s embracing the challenge of figuring out what design means for a service that is essentially little more than a platform for 140-character messages.
As I was listening the conversation, I realized that desire lines were pertinent.
Designers come from a tradition of figuring out the whole system, and putting it out there. But the success of Twitter has emerged from an approach that’s nearly 180 degrees from that. Twitter began simply as a way to post 140-character messages, and allowed remarkable freedom in following. Almost no structure was placed on the system. It’s through the paths that users have worn in the system (e.g., @ replies, retweets, hashtags, followfridays) that Twitter has grown to realize the value of the service, and they’ve made initial steps to “pave” those most popular paths (most notably replies, though Doug mentioned that they are considering how to more formally support retweeting as well).
A chellenge for many organizations is to have the nimbleness of design and development to take advantage of this type of evolution. At this stage in the game, if you’re company is not able to quickly iterate, and are required to produce laborious specs and have staged releases months, quarters, or even farther apart, well, as the internet is famous for saying, “You’re doing it wrong.”
A couple other thoughts from the GigaOm event:
- As I tweeted at the event, the participant mix was about 95% male. This is pathetic. It was also overwhelmingly white and Asian. It is only from a diversity of perspectives that we’ll hit upon the great ideas that will carry us forward.
- It intrigued me that though this event was about the “next web”, it felt very much to be about figuring out the current Web. Considering how many blowhards have dismissed the Web as a solved problem, the conversation among these very smart people suggested it is anything but.
Entries (RSS)
October 27th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Couldn’t agree more about desire lines. I did a presentation on the subject for APCHI in about 2004 because I was surprised there was not more written about them.
The paper is here…
Commercial Success by looking for desire lines
And powerpoint presentation is here…
Commercial Success by looking for desire lines (.ppt)
I hope the next edition of the excellent ‘Universal Principles of Design’ covers this much better than I did!
October 28th, 2009 at 9:27 am
There’s a virtual “desire line” in my web browser, whereby I use the NoSquint plugin to expand the tiny fonts on this page to 150% of what your web designer specified. This way I can cut across the lawn of your web design and get where I’d like to be.
-danny
October 28th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Peter, great post. I’m reminded of a conversation with an architect friend who was telling me that the best in her field are smart enough not to include a complete network of paths and walkways in their drawings and plans. They complete the building, lay the sod and see where the people walk. Then they know where the paths are actually needed (much like your pic).
October 30th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
I think its true, they are extremly lucky that they can launch a product and pick up on user trends to steer where they need to go.
It’s a unique scenario to be in and a lucky one for them as well. The only issue I see is that they are always going to be reactionary. It’s hard to make changes when a large community relies on you on, look at how the Facebook book crowd freaks out everytime they update.
November 12th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
“Considering how many blowhards have dismissed the Web as a solved problem, the conversation among these very smart people suggested it is anything but.”
Thanks for pointing that out. So many veteran user-experience practitioners seem to think they have to “outgrow” the Web. Madness. We’ve only started getting our heads around this thing we made.