When Users Go Off-Path: Listening to What Desire Paths Tell Us
I don't know when it happened, or how, but there were always signs. Maybe it was my constant playing of games like SimCity, Roller Coaster Tycoon, and Age of Empires. Maybe it was our family vacations growing up—visiting places like Ludington, Michigan; Santa Cruz, California; Brown County, Indiana; and countless other charming Midwest towns.
But I'm obsessed with cities.
Not just big cities—I gush over small communities, small towns, and small cities. I love looking at city planning and learning how each place has taken shape over time. I could talk about city branding all day, especially city flags. (Ask my wife—I have an unhealthy collection of them from our travels over the years.)
But one thing I can’t help but always notice are desire paths.
Finding Desire Paths in the Wild
I actually learned about desire paths from a UX talk back in 2015, and ever since, I’ve noticed them everywhere. “Desire paths”—sometimes called desire lines, social trails, or goat paths—are the naturally formed routes people (or animals) make by repeatedly taking the most convenient or intuitive path across an area, rather than the one that was formally designed or paved.
A desire path forms when enough people cut across grass, dirt, or snow that it wears a visible trail. It’s a record of collective human behavior—a literal trace of what people actually do, rather than what designers expected them to do.
You’ve seen them before: a dirt shortcut across a park that cuts between sidewalks. That’s a desire path. Not defiance—just instinct.
When I first learned about desire paths, I was blown away by how they connect to product design. For the past ten years, they’ve reminded me that users will always seek the easiest route—the path of least resistance.
When users fail, it’s often because the path we thought was right doesn’t match how people actually move through the experience. In UX, these desire paths appear in heatmaps, drop-offs, and feedback loops. They’re the trails users leave behind when our intended flow doesn’t match their reality.
Desire Paths in Action
Let’s look at the oval walkways at Ohio State University.
Before any sidewalks were poured, university officials let students wear down paths from building to building to determine which routes were most natural. When construction crews came in to build sidewalks, they poured concrete directly over those desire paths.
The crews didn’t guess where students would walk—they observed and studied. They noticed patterns, then built upon them.
When we think of product and UX design, we need to know our customers’ behavior. Because the truth is, desire paths are not a user problem—they’re a design signal.
Human Behavior and Maximizing Efficiency
It’s not just urban planning that shows this pattern of behavior. Think about video games and speedrunners.
If you watch someone speedrunning a game (completing it as quickly as possible), you’ll see players use glitches, tricks, and specific routes to bypass slower, “intended” paths.
Or in retail stores, watch how customers rearrange shelves or use products in unexpected ways.
People naturally find the most efficient, intuitive route—even when systems aren’t designed to help them do it.
What User Feedback Tells Us About UX
Too often, we see a user who tries. Fails. Tries again. And still fails—and we assume they’re lazy or not engaging.
But we should ask:
Was the system built to help them succeed?
Can we reframe “user error” and instead see it as a chance for empathetic design that learns from failure?
Because UX is invisible—until it fails.
The best UX isn’t just beautiful. It’s logical. Clear. It guides users without friction or hangups.
Applying User Paths to UX Design
Every time I see a desire path in a different city or town, I think about what it’s saying:
“This way makes more sense to me.”
The best UX listens—and then builds the sidewalk where the grass is already worn.
And I try to apply that lesson to the products we use daily:
→ Navigation confusion
→ Jakob’s Law of UX
→ Page load speeds crawl
→ Button and CTA behavior
→ User flows break unexpectedly
And too often, we blame the user:
“They didn’t get it.”
“They gave up.”
Next time your analytics say “Users didn’t finish the journey,” don’t ask what they missed. Ask what we didn’t make clear.
And be on the lookout for desire paths in the wild. They’re fascinating—and they can teach us a lot about human behavior.