On parks and campuses, alongside paved walkways, you'll find worn dirt paths cutting across grass. These are called desire paths, the routes people actually take, rather than the ones architects planned for them to take.
I've been noticing the digital equivalent lately. When you watch how people actually use software, you'll see them creating their own desire paths through the interface. They'll repurpose features in ways the designers never intended, find creative workarounds for missing functionality, and generally refuse to stay on the paved walkways of intended use.
At first glance, this might seem like users being difficult. But like physical desire paths, these behaviors reveal something important: the gap between how we think people should work and how they actually want to work.
Think about how people use spreadsheets. Excel was designed for financial modeling, but it's become the default tool for everything from project management to party planning. People use it as a database, a form builder, even a crude UI prototyping tool. Each of these use cases represents a desire path - users finding that the quickest route to their goal cuts across the grass of intended functionality.
Or take Slack's emoji reactions. They were designed as a way to respond to messages without cluttering the channel. But watch any active Slack workspace and you'll see them being used for voting, task tracking, and elaborate inside jokes. Users discovered that these little icons could serve as a lightweight database, tracking state and consensus in a way the designers hadn't anticipated.
What's particularly interesting is how consistent these desire paths are. When enough users independently discover the same workaround or repurpose the same feature in the same way, it's telling us something.
Sometimes these digital desire paths become so well-traveled that they transform into official features. Twitter didn't invent the hashtag or the retweet, the users did. The company just paved the paths their users had already worn into the service. The same thing happened with Facebook's Messenger app, which emerged after users started using Facebook's messaging feature as their primary communication channel.
But there's often resistance to paving these paths. Product teams can be surprisingly hostile to how people actually use their software, insisting that users are "doing it wrong" when they stray from intended use patterns.
The wisdom in digital desire paths isn't just that they show us what users want - they show us what users want badly enough to fight the interface for. When users consistently "misuse" a feature, they're not being difficult. They're telling us something important about what they need.
This has implications beyond software design. Email was designed as a digital version of office memos, but users turned it into something closer to instant messaging. PowerPoint was meant for presentations, but in many organizations it's become the default format for documents of all kinds. These aren't failures of user education, they're successful adaptations.
Smart designers have learned to look for these paths and learn from them. Instead of trying to force users back onto the paved walkways, they study where people are actually going and why. Often, the best new features come from simply paving the existing desire paths.
The prevalence of desire paths, both physical and digital, suggests something about human nature. Given any system, people will find ways to adapt it to their actual needs, regardless of how it was intended to be used. The most successful designs don't fight this tendency, they embrace it. The next time you find yourself using a piece of software in a way that feels like a hack or a workaround, pay attention. You might be walking a desire path that shows where the future of that software should go.