The power of 'other' - paving the paths your customers prefer

In Universal Principles of Design, a desire line (or design path) is a trace of use or wear that indicates "preferred methods of interaction with an object or environment". On the face of it, a very esoteric concept but in practice it is quite simple.

Many years ago, I read of a case where a new college campus was built and there was a central grassed area. Instead of laying down cement paths, the area was left for a year without marked paths. At the end of that time, paths had been worn by pedestrians taking their most preferred paths across the grass. After that it was a simple matter to lay paths over those already worn by the pedestrians. These paths, of course, perfectly matched the needs of the pedestrians.

However, the principle is not limited to physical settings. A recent example I am aware of was where a new web-based system was put in place for customers to submit a form on-line. In designing the form, the company only wanted the customers to choose a reason for submitting the form from a limited number of options preferred by the company. In order to force this, there was no 'Other' option. This was done in the belief that the customers would just select from the available options. Instead about 30% of customers couldn't find the option they wanted and so just chose a random option and then put their real reason in the text box provided. In effect, they worked around the constraints imposed by the system and in the process made it more difficult for the company to analyse the reasons why customers were submitting the form (which had flow on effects for training and work allocation.)

A better alternative would have been to provide a limited range of the most common reasons expected but also to provide 'Other' as an option. This would have allowed the 'Other' options to be analysed to see if they yielded a further set of explicit options to add. In effect, adding the 'Other' option would have allowed the customers to wear their own 'desire path' which could have then been 'paved over' by providing the additional options they desired.

Too often our preconceptions about customers blind us to what they really want. The power of 'Other' is that it gives your customers the opportunity to tell you!

As Tim Halbur puts it:

...the human element is going to find its own way.... The people who disobey the beautiful logic of smart growth and urban design are trying to tell us something, and we need to watch and listen. We need to go back to the places we create and see how they work in real life. We need to plan for opening day, but make sure we’re also there a month, a year, five years later to adapt and refine based on how people actually use the built environment. The desire paths are there for the finding, if your eyes are open

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If we let our customers wear their own preferred paths and we then build over them, they are happier and we end up with more efficient systems.