The term originally refers to landscape architecture, where it is describing a path in a park or green field that isn’t designed by the architects, but is created by people finding their own trails. They usually manifest as short-cut foot paths, eroding away the sward, and are often fought with fences and signs: “Keep off the grass!”

Looked at differently, these paths are documenting the perceived inadequacy and rejection of a plotted spatial design.

The article outlines the implications of “desire path” inscriptions for the field of web and service design. Let’s dive briefly into history first.

“In the beginning there was the homepage” could be a valid starting point for a history of web design. The homepage was a starting point for the user journey, a safe harbour for users surfing the deep waters of the Internet.

From there not much could go wrong originally. In the early Nineties homepages were barely more than linear text, with occasional headings and subheadings; a linear stream of words, only disrupted by underlined words in blue which marked connections to other pages, servers and sites. These connections were paraphrased as the auguries of a new type of non-linear text (“hyper text”).

Back then, all of these links on home pages were pointing to points somewhere in the unchartered terrains of the World Wide Web. For students pondering with markup language at the time they constituted a proof for their open-mindedness and connectivity within a multidimensional academic universe.

A lot has happened since then.
These days, commercial web site owners would rather change their web agency than to let any of the site visitors disappear from their carefully crafted home pages into any distant vault on a server far far away. The predominant idea today is to drag visitors deeper into a web site, comforting them with prominent unique selling points of products, with irresistible discount offers in web stores, and with positive customer testimonials – all supporting sales, or at least fueling an interest in a company’s products.

Yet web site visitors don’t really seem to appreciate the nicely laid out paths. Just as park visitors make their own trails by carving out footpaths offside the official tracks, web site visitors don’t follow the carefully crafted navigation paths either. More and more often we see users rather refining their search in Google than to bother with the navigation of a consumer web site.
As a result, web site visits are getting shorter and shorter, lasting for less than three pages on average, and with much shorter time-on-site values than two years ago.

The countless “Buy now” buttons that we can see on commercial home pages more and more often may make us believe that a quick and instant conversion is what people are looking for.
The underlying Web Analytics figures tell us a different story: Rates for purchase conversions stagnate well below ten percent across industries, Search Engine visits do most often end up on deeper navigational levels than the home page (which is a pity! Nobody sees the beautiful “Buy now!” buttons and teasers down there), and only occasionally these visits are traversing the site’s home page. And mostly, if they do: exit.

The “desire paths” web site visitors seem to have in mind surely are centered around taking the shortest possible path, but as Christoph Alexander has pointed out in his book “A pattern language” (in 1977!): “The layout of paths will seem right and comfortable only when it is compatible with the process of walking…” (pattern 120, Paths and Goals).

From here we dare to formulate a hypothesis: people promenading in a park are less likely to cut corners than people who try to reach their bus stop at the other side of it. We can tell the promenaders from those traversing by watching their behaviour. And we will see, undoubtedly: the “process of walking” has many faces.

In a similar manner we need to consider the web site promenaders as separate from the traversers and we need to make specific offers to accommodate both their needs.

Yet there is only one home page on each web site, and still the idea may prevail that there must be an ideal path layout. Sure – there are possibilities to prevent people from cutting the corners, but as Are Halland has laid out in his brilliant presentation “Core and paths” in 2007 the crystal clear design principles are too often obfuscated by the “Seven Deadly Sins of IA”, particularly by increasing the amount of choices.

In Alexander’s words: “To lay out paths, first place goals at natural points of interest. Then connect the goals to one another to form the paths. The paths may be straight, or gently curving between goals; their paving should swell around the goal.”

This approach, of course, presupposes a web site owner’s ability to cater for the most obvious short cut towards the goal. But on plenty of web sites we see the contrary: overcomplicated navigation patterns with multiple layers, flanked by category teasers, special product offers, obfuscated contact points, unclear pricing options hidden deep within the “place you order here!” funnel, etc.

Just as fifteen different brands of margarine don’t support easy decision making in a supermarket, offering five different ways to reach the same page on a web site doesn’t support easy decision making, either.

To design a web site from the home page may have been considered appropriate in the mid-Nineties. In 2011 you are wasting your money (as a business owner) and your time (or that of your agency) on this task.

Further reading:
Are Halland: Core and Paths (On Slideshare)

Christoph Alexander: A pattern language (New York, 1977). Available through a book store near you