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Design principle: The power of desire lines
Let your user show you the path
Here is this week’s design principle post. It is focused on desire lines or desire paths, whichever you prefer.
Check last week post:
O.K. Let’s get started with the desire lines.
Once upon a time, there was a genius architect. After completing a new building, he decided to leave the courtyard and other grassy areas around the building without sidewalks. The idea was to let people use the building for a year and let their use form trails in the grass. Then lay the sidewalks on top of those paths.
This story illustrates a great way to find out how people actually behave. Desire lines are a consequence of the usage of the shortest route to a destination. They are evidence of how much traffic a “path” receives. After that, the desire lines can be used as a blueprint for the design. So simple, beautiful, and efficient!
The principle behind desire lines allows users to show their needs with their behavior. This is the surest way to know what your users really want. Observing natural behavior is a much more accurate indicator of users' needs than talking to users and trying to figure the needs from interviews.
Letting users' behavior dictate the UX of your product is the essence of user-centered design. Forming that deep understanding of the user behavior will guide your design in a better direction.
It is important to note that observing the behavior should happen without the user knowing she is observed. It must be non-invasive. You need to play the role of a ninja stalker for the sake of designing better UX. Once the user feels/knows that somebody is observing the behavior changes and it won’t reflect the reality that well.
Desire lines are an unbiased and statistical measure of how people use things. The perfect blueprint for your design.
