A side effect of Design Thinking was the penetration of design terms into the collective consciousness. For better or for worse, it gave stakeholders some limited vocabulary to express what it was they didn’t like about a product.

“Intuitive” is the perfect example of this trade-off. Users demand software to be intuitive. Stakeholders and cross-functional partners use “it’s not intuitive” to strike out design decisions they don’t like. And yet, no one can precisely define what “intuitive” actually means. Because at the end of the day, there is nothing intuitive about user interfaces. The word is, instead, a shorthand for “familiar”: I have seen this before, I recognize how it works, I can reuse lessons I learned in the past.

This is one of the many reasons that design patterns tend to reproduce themselves. The other main reason is that it’s easier to copy what someone else did than to come up with your own solution. Which creates a perverse incentive: the memes that propagate within UX and Product are whatever is most salient to practitioners.

In simpler terms: if one product yells at you, other products are more likely to decide that they should yell at you too.

Anyone could tell you that people are overwhelmed, that the attention economy is struggling with inflation issues, that what we need is more calm technology. But it’s not what we are building.

Instead, what the paradigm of salience-driven copying has given us is universal phantom obligation. Every experience is being designed to yell at us, whether it makes sense for the context or not, because that is what stakeholders have seen other experiences do.

But recall: our tools shape how we think (I feel like I need to add a section to this site for evergreen essays, and this one just may be at the top of the list). Our notification-heavy software trains us to behave in ways that appease it. Not only to rush to attend to the notifications, but to create notification-worthy outputs so that our work may be granted attention in turn.

Through this mechanism, the toxic logic of algorithms that nudge and influence and control consumer tech makes its way back to its very designers. Our professional decision-making becomes influenced by the exact same factors. Individual contributors ask: what will show up on the dashboard? Managers ask: what figures from the dashboard can I present to my leaders?

This is not value. And the more you lean into dashboard thinking and let algorithm vendors privatize your brain, the less actual value you will produce.

Sure, the metrics are supposed to be a proxy for value. But long-time readers will know that this is rarely the case. Bureaucracies prefer to track what is easiest to measure, rather than what is most relevant. Often, what trickles its way down to us is not the actual strategy, but merely these metrics. And if you want to do work that actually matters, you owe it to yourself to reverse-engineer the strategy out of these metrics.

This will let you tell which part of the dashboard is noise — present only because it is easy to track — and which part anyone actually cares about. And the latter may not appear on the dashboard at all!

Because what people tell you to focus on is rarely “strategic.” The attention economy rears its ugly head here again:

But what is urgent is not always important, and developing a reputation as a product janitor is not equivalent to long-term career prospects. Valuable, strategic action is coherent action and it behooves us to resist the noise fueled by snake oil sold as “best practices” and think about what we are actually doing. And of course, to propagate that thinking throughout the organization.

Counter-intuitively, this means that under-appreciated domains such as internal tooling, to which no one in your org has actually given any thought before, may be the best opportunity to set your own definitions of success — one that meaningfully aligns with the strategy, and not just the most salient vanity metric at the time the dashboard was being built.

— Pavel at the Product Picnic