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Taylor Davidson

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Cutting a desire path through life

Started by Taylor Davidson · 1 year ago

No Path — Dolly Sods, West Virginia

Although you may not notice, desire paths pop up throughout our daily life. Next time you walk from one place to another, note the route you choose. Do you stick to the designed paths? Do you stick to the paved path, the gravel road, the marked […]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Cutting a desire ... Continue reading »

4 comments

  • Bryan Landers

    5 months ago

    Love love love this concept! So, on the product design tip, are metrics the best way to observe desire paths? Are Google Analytics enough or are other, custom tools needed?
    reply
  • Taylor Davidson

    5 months ago

    How would you follow, track and understand product usage? Observation, heat-mapping and eye-tracking, Google Analytics, the "focus group of one" approach (I'm not a fan of actual focus groups), all of these are ways to observe how people use one's products and can be used as the basis for tests and permanent design changes.

    But carrying it forward, how can you make the product adapt on its own, naturally, without your intervention? How can it be a platform to allow people to create innovations on top of it?
    reply
  • Bryan Landers

    5 months ago

    What other tools/services have you heard of? I've seen Overture, Google Analytics, any other recommendations?

    Re: products self-adapting, that's going to be amazing! For now, the best I see is where a service is so general that a third-party ecosystem can innovate on top of it. Twitter would be an example...also, desire paths can be observed and implemented by humans (not as cool as self-adapting, but still very wonderful and smart). Twitter added the @reply functionality only after users set up the convention.
    reply
  • Taylor Davidson

    5 months ago

    Great timing: a post by Noah Brier on desire paths and using web data: http://www.noahbrier.com/archives/2009/01/think...
    reply

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