The Myth of the Curious User
Design culture has a quiet obsession with the exploratory user. A user who pokes around a product, stumbles across features, and builds a mental map of the whole system. Designers secretly build a lot of UX strategy around this person. But here’s the thing: this type of user is in the minority.
Most people using your product have a job to do. They’re not on a discovery journey. They’re trying to finish something so they can move on to the next thing. When they learn one path that works, that path can become their entire relationship with a product. Asking them to deviate from that path feels, to them, like you’re asking them to solve a puzzle when they just want to get lunch.
This isn't a digital-literacy problem or an engagement problem. It’s just how most humans operate under time pressure and cognitive load. They satisfice. They find good enough and protect it.
What Satisficing Actually Means for Design
Herbert Simon coined the term satisficing in the 1950s, and it’s never been more relevant. Satisficing is the behavior of finding a solution that’s sufficient and stopping there rather than searching for the optimal solution. Users do this constantly. Honestly, it’s a rational choice. Their goal isn’t to master a product. Their goal is to complete whatever task a product is supposed to help them accomplish.
If a UX strategy depends on users gradually discovering value over time through organic exploration, asking how many users are actually doing that would be a worthwhile question versus learning how many users just found one workflow and locked in on it.
Designing for the Locked-In User
If you know a significant number of users are going to find one path and stick to it, the question becomes: for what should you optimize? Should you go with just one path or enough paths for multiple user personas?
Make the Default Path Genuinely Good
The most important design decision you can make for locked-in users is ensuring that their default path is understandable and actually provides a great experience. Not fine. Not functional. Great. Because these users are never going to wander over to a better version of any feature. The path they found on day one is the product from their perspective.
This means doing serious work on what happens when someone opens your product for the first time and just follows the most obvious route. What does that journey look like? Is it smooth? Is it fast? Does it give users what they came for without any friction?
A lot of products are built with depth as the reward for exploration. That’s fine, but this can’t come at the expense of the surface layer, which is where most of users live permanently.
