Follow the User

Are you trying to dictate the path your users will take through your experiences? If so, you might be making the same mistake as the urban planner who designed the right-angle-only pathway in the photo above.

As the image shows, people have decided — quite correctly — that they can get from A to B much more quickly by cutting across the grass and, in doing so, creating quite a dirty mess.

While it’s easy to label these grass tramplers as scofflaws, the truth is they are just normal human beings doing what human beings have always done: finding the quickest, easiest way through any given situation.

So, if you’re going to try to dictate a path for your users, you better be absolutely certain (with a lot of user testing) that it’s a path that makes sense for them. If you can’t do testing, then you better offer options and escape routes.

If you don’t, expect your grass to get trampled.