Desire Lines

When you're building your interface, you cannot predict how users will behave. You put common links on the side, support breadcrumb navigation, and build a flexible menu system. But the users still have to jump through hoops to move from task to task. Perhaps they regularly jump to the home page or main menu and then trek back down through the system to find the tool they need next.

Users are forming Desire Lines in your UI. They are telling you what order they typically perform tasks in, but you cannot see them. Unfortunately, these lines are not as obvious as the dead grass and dirt that characterize them on university campuses. As a UI designer you must gather the data and observe the trends. Then you can pave the desire lines with concrete and help your users get where they really want to go.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_lines

A desire line is a path developed by erosion caused by animal or human footfall. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and amount of erosion of the line represents the amount of demand. Desire lines were used in early transportation planning, prior to the advent of computerized models.

They are manifested on the surface of the earth in certain cases, e.g., as dirt pathways created by people walking through a field, when the original movement by individuals helps clear a path, thereby encouraging more travel. Explorers may tread a path through foliage or grass, leaving a trail "of least resistance" for followers.

The lines may be seen along an unpaved road shoulder or some other unpaved natural surface. The paths take on an organically grown appearance by being unbiased toward existing constructed routes. These are almost always the most direct and the shortest routes between two points, and may later be surfaced.

Desire lines can usually be found as shortcuts in places where constructed pathways take a circuitous route.

Many streets in old cities began as desire lines which evolved over the decades or centuries into the modern streets of today.

If users could leave desire lines in our applications, then these would instruct later users, as well as designers, in how users find their paths across our applications. Don Norman calls desire lines social signifiers. They are signifiers that are created by the behavior of social groups. Our pristine application interfaces aren't trodden by the feet of countless travelers, but would they be better interfaces if they were?

Perhaps interface designers can look for ways to instrument their user interfaces to report this data and improve constantly. Certainly this is an accepted technique for observing users' paths through a website and it should be adopted and supported by user interface frameworks across all platforms.