Technological Desire Paths
You can’t make people use tech a certain way, you need to adapt your tools to the needs of your users
I’ve always been fascinated with the phenomenon known as ‘desire paths’. These beaten trails are human nature’s way of saying that the paved paths are inefficient and are in fact so inefficient, that people are willing to walk through the dirt for a faster path. My favorite part about desire paths is that there’s really no way to get rid of them. I’ve seen countless examples of grounds crews trying to stop people from taking desire paths to keep the (usually) grassy area looking nice, but it never works. Human nature is too strong to overcome here. The only option is to provide the paved pathways the desire paths—well—desire.
Desire Paths in Tech
We can see other instances of ‘desire paths’ in other places—including technology. There are things that you just can’t get people to do no matter how hard you try. There are countless stories out there of people who want their product to be something else, despite what users seem to want.
Yup, We’re Talking About Arc Again
I’m not sorry. I really like this browser and I’m consistently disappointed by The Browser Company, who constantly sought to turn their products into something they weren’t: Google Chrome.
The Browser Company went on and on about how they wanted to build the browser that their moms would use, but in order to go after that goal, they abandoned their entire user base and tried to pivot them to something they didn’t want.
There was nothing wrong with Arc. It was a great browser for internet power users. Those who spend their whole day going through web apps like Gmail, Docs, Sheets, etc. and they abandoned it in search of something they couldn’t be.
They thought that they would be able to bring the same philosophy to Dia and convert more users away from what they know. They tried to skip the ‘early adopter’ phase and go straight to being ‘mainstream’ but it wasn’t what their users wanted. The Browser Company tried so hard to keep people away from the desire path that was the ethos behind Arc, but no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t get people to stop stepping on that grass.
Instead of paving over it and making everyone’s life easier, they just scorched the earth, doomed to fade into irrelevance as an enterprise product.
