3 years ago, iOS 17 included a new feature when zooming images in the Photos app: a little “Crop” button in the top-right.
When I first noticed this, I was amused and delighted, because I had seen many people zooming-then-screenshotting in order to crop a photo, and done the same myself.
It’s easy to look down upon these kinds of things when you know the “correct” way to do it. And the “correct” way, in this case, is not exactly hard, per se; you’re supposed to tap the “Adjust” button, then enter the “Crop” mode, where you have a full interactive UI for cropping.
And it’s funny, because that method of screenshot-to-crop is essentially the digital equivalent of a “Desire Path”—when a path is so useful that it doesn’t matter that it’s not paved, and people are going to keep walking there until you physically force them to stop.
Note that I don’t actually know if Apple added the crop button as a specific response to the screenshotting behavior, I’m inferring causality here, though it may not actually matter.
It turns out there are a lot of cases of these Digital Desire Paths. A 2024 information systems paper even uses the term “digital desire paths” for workplace workarounds.
We can think of the comparison like this:
Design | User behavior |
Designed path | Open image → tap Adjust button → tap Crop button → crop → save |
Desire path | Pinch until the screen shows the desired framing → screenshot |
“Paved” path | Pinch until the screen shows the desired framing → tap Crop |
But there are a whole bunch of other examples in surprisingly different contexts, using surprisingly varied methods, going back way before the invention of the smartphone.
If you’re old enough, you probably remember initiating a collect telephone call, cramming “mompracticeisoverpickmeup!!” in when they ask you to state who’s calling, then hanging up, saving yourself a quarter or three.
Today we might call something like that a “life hack,” and there are a million of them, extending arbitrarily far throughout human history. Here’s another fun one: before envelopes were mass-produced, writers of letters began developing techniques for folding and tucking the letter sheets themselves into a secure, self-contained, mailable object. This practice of “Letterlocking” even evolved security systems, with certain folds and seals that could reveal whether the message had been opened.
Folk Interactions
I’m not here to talk about life hacks, though. I want to focus on a set of practices that we’ll call “Folk Interactions.” Roughly, a folk interaction is an act or procedure invented by users and transmitted socially that repurposes existing features or side-effects in unintended or unexpected ways.
HCI researchers have been studying this subject for decades, under terminology such as technology appropriation, workarounds, and design-in-use. I’m using “folk interactions” here to refer specifically to recognizable procedures or conventions that spread among users and communities—hence “folk.”
Let’s look at some other examples.
@s and #s
When Twitter launched in 2006 (after being renamed from Twttr), it did not feature any built-in mention, reply, or hashtag systems.
However, people wanted to be able to mention specific other users. So people began using
@username in tweets to address others. For a while, this was just an emergent practice; they were still just strings with no actual additional functionality. It wasn’t until later that Twitter formalized this practice with clickable mentions, replies, and notifications.Similarly, in 2007, web marketing specialist Chris Messina proposed to Twitter—in person, by walking into their office—that they use a
# to “create groups of related Tweets.” Twitter did not immediately jump on this idea, but they didn’t need to. Chris and many, many others started doing it anyway, and in 2009 it too was formalized.Bumps
Here’s another common internet practice: the forum “bump.” You want your post to show up at the top again? Didn’t get the attention you thought it deserved? Just reply to your own thread!
If you’ve spent any time on the internets, you’re nearly guaranteed to have encountered this. As far back as 2000 (and certainly before that), forum users and mods have been arguing about bumping.
This simple idea didn’t start with a name; it had to be invented. The first coinage is probably lost to history, but there are other vocabularies, such as
up, TTT, and ^.Some forum software now offers explicit buttons that afford this or similar functionality, but interestingly, they simply don’t need to.
There are so many more examples: like texting yourself as the fastest way to jot down something important or make sure you remember something, or emailing yourself such that your inbox becomes a to-do list, or keeping browser tabs open for similar purposes, and on and on and on.
Valuable, but Not Necessarily “Good”
None of this means folk interactions are necessarily beneficial or valuable to everyone. They can be annoying, exploitative, or even dangerous. “Bumping” may be a folk interaction, but it’s also a manipulation of a system for one user’s benefit, to the probable irritation of many other users. Cowpaths can cause real issues of erosion, habitat damage, drainage, or the long-term health of the landscape.
Treating users as authors, as we’ll look at below, means taking their inventions seriously. It doesn’t mean automatically endorsing them, and it certainly doesn’t mean designers should always formalize and integrate them.
An Oral Tradition of Software
It would be easy to conclude from all this that designers should simply watch what their users are doing and turn their clever workarounds into features. Sometimes, that’s probably exactly what you should do. Apple’s crop button and Twitter codifying (literally, I guess) the @ mention and hashtag save people the trouble of their folk interaction or make it even more useful.
But there’s a more interesting observation here: users don’t merely discover potential features. They can implement new capabilities themselves without changing the software.
Before Twitter understood an
@mention, Twitter users did. The software, as-designed, saw an undifferentiated string where communities of humans saw an address or a topic.Folk interactions are therefore something like an oral tradition of software. Much like cultural oral traditions persist information that institutions don’t, folk interactions are traces of ideas, replicated by others, that were never formally designed or even intended, and may never be formally specified, recognized, or implemented.
Oral traditions are mutable, transmittable, and emerge from communities. The mutability—like using
bump or TTT or something else entirely—not only offers flexibility but also affords future invention and discovery, just like genetic mutations. As memes, they can proliferate widely and quickly. And they’re rarely the result of one single person—Mr. Messina notwithstanding—instead arising from groups of people who could be scattered anywhere as long as they can still communicate. But even if they originate with one identifiable person, they can’t become folk practices without communities.Perhaps the most uniquely important angle of all is that folk interactions make users authors. We, as designers, must not think of users of our software as passive consumers of a strictly-regimented, expertly-architected machine. We must recognize that these abstract “users” are human beings, and humans are nothing if not clever and inventive.
Look at it this way. User interfaces—or, perhaps, the best interfaces—are never designed once. They are continuously redesigned by populations of people, who sometimes discover practices so useful to them that you can’t stop them, even if you wanted to. Folk interactions are features implemented in culture before they are implemented in code, and cultures are fluid, ever-shifting, and unbelievably creative.