What are desire lines?
How many times have you gone to a park and found alternative paths created by the people themselves who are taking a walk and want to shorten the path? This is a clear example of a people-centred design created by the people themselves. We are looking at a model of desire lines.
Is it a design that has failed? Has the designer not thought of all the casuistries where the user was in a hurry? Not at all, in iterative design failure does not exist, otherwise we would be talking about design with a full stop, and that is not our intention.
Desire lines in product design
It is a perfect example that the design is not optimised for certain profiles, who want to get from point A to B faster or more comfortably. The wider and more defined the line, the more demanded the alternative navigation will be.
But that this happens is the best thing that could happen to us, because we have clear feedback telling us what people want. We should use this to our advantage and in the example above, we could pave it.
But how can we find out the desire lines in an app or website? In thousands of ways, such as looking at users' search history, heatmaps, click paths, feedback loops... We will know more about the users' usage pattern and check if the design is optimised to complete the tasks they demand and not the tasks we think they demand.
Products
Integrately
8 Million+ Ready Automations For 500+ Apps. All you need to do is select automation and activate it. That’s it.
Graha
Collaborative design review for any website. Revise your live website copy and designs with your clients or team seamlessly and collaborate in real time as if you were in the same room.
Playbook
Make your cloud storage beauuutiful. Intelligently organize, share, and collaborate on files and folders with your whole team.
Easyvoice
Make your ideas come to life with a voice app. No coding needed. Create your voice app in minutes and publish to Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.
Queue
Get your reviews done 10x faster. Queue lets you collect feedback directly on your website.
Articles & Ideas
Qualitative Usability Testing: Study Guide
Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn about planning, conducting, and analyzing qualitative user testing. Kate Moran
Levelling up the Design Org
At Redgate we place a significant emphasis on the growth and development of our employees. This investment in folks’ progression is, I believe, one of the main reasons why we continue to attract and retain some amazing people. Matthew Godfrey
UX vs. Service Design
User experience is focused on what the end user encounters, whereas service design is focused on how that user experience is internally created. Sarah Gibbons
Accessible contrast ratios and A-levels explained
All about those A's — your guide to understanding and making use of the ratios that determine your accessible contrast. Team Stark
Accessibility in E-Commerce: Use ‘ALT’ Text to Communicate the Core Content of “Informational” Images (55% of Sites Don’t)
In e-commerce, images are heavily used to communicate information about products and services — and thus are often crucial to users’ ability to evaluate products and services. Alex Krzyminski
Writing great alt text: Emotion matters
Good alt text means that screen reader users get the same 'meaning' from the page as a fully sighted user. But sometimes that's easier said than done. Jake Archibald
UX Principles that include Cognitive Accessibility
As so much of what neurodivergent users need is rooted in a mixture of usability best practices and accessibility considerations, I wondered if there was a need for a Cognitive perspective on UX Design Principles. Gareth Ford Williams
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