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.

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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.

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Take #JohnDeere. While today the company is notorious for its war on its customers (via its opposition to #RightToRepair), 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:

securityledger.com/2019/03/opi…

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Opinion: my Grandfather’s John Deere would support our Right to Repair | The Security Ledger with Paul F. Roberts

Willie Cade's grandfather, Theo, an engineer at John Deere, helped invent the manure spreader. His grandson thinks John Deere's efforts to kill right to repair legislation is what stinks.

^{Willie Cade (The Security Ledger)}

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.

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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.

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Companies are obsessed with discovering #DigitalDesirePaths. They pay for #analytics software to produce maps of how users interact with their services, run focus groups, even embed sneaky screen-recording software into their web-pages:

wired.com/story/the-dark-side-…

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!

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The Dark Side of 'Replay Sessions' That Record Your Every Move Online

Behind many consumer websites, software companies track users' moves, potentially exposing personal information such as medical conditions or prescription-drug use.

^{Nitasha Tiku (WIRED)}