A desire path is a trail worn by the walkers, not drawn by the planners. You
see them in every park, cut diagonally across the intersection where the
sidewalk turns.
What the desire path means
The planner drew a square. The walkers showed that the square was wrong. The
path is a vote, and it is a vote the planners cannot argue with because it is
worn into the earth.
The desire path that is still wrong
I watched a path form in a park that took people through a muddy area in
winter. The path persisted even in summer, when a direct route would have been
drier. The desire path was chosen for a reason—it was visible from the street,
it felt safer—and the reason was not efficiency.
Why this matters
A desire path is not always the shortest route. It is the route people prefer.
The reason is often safety, or visibility, or the feeling of being on a
path rather than cutting through space.
Paving the desire path straight might make it faster and worse, if the reason
people chose it was that it felt safer to be on an obvious path.
The website’s desire path
Analytics show where people click, what they skip, what they search for. The
desire path in an interface is a trail of clicks.
The mistake is paving it without understanding why it formed. If people are
clicking through three pages to get to the one thing they need, the desire path
is not “make it faster,” it is “understand why they are avoiding the direct
route.”
What I do now
I follow the desire path to understand it, not to optimize it. I ask why the
trail goes where it does. Then I change the thing that makes the direct route
feel wrong, instead of straightening the trail.
The desire path is always right for a reason. The reason is not always
efficiency.