Volume 6: User-Adjacent Design
Recently Instagram made a change to the way their feed works. They show you the newest posts from the accounts you follow, the ones you haven't seen yet, but they hide the posts you've already seen and instead replace them with an endless scroll of suggested posts. The goal being for you to follow new accounts.
At first glance, this update may seem harmless enough, but it represents a concerning trend in digital product design: features that seem to solve a problem for the user, but in reality, are designed with the business in mind.
I've started calling these features and the process behind them "User-Adjacent Design."
The term User-Adjacent Design feels innocuous, but it actually facilitates an insidiousness that lives in these features, allowing them to sit in a gray area where you could make an argument that it's good for the user. In Instagram's case, you could say that people want to discover new accounts to follow. But in reality, the feature is about business goals. More accounts followed means more engagement, means more ads, means more revenue.
User-adjacency means you can hide your head in the sand and still claim a user-centered process. "People want to discover new accounts, we're solving a real problem." I've been a part of more of these kind of conversations than I can count. Sometimes the intent is called out explicitly, but more frequently it's hidden in plain sight behind user-adjacent concerns. This is why it's a concerning trend, the justification makes it difficult to see what's happening, but over time as these features stack up, it can start to snowball into negative outcomes for users.
Designing a product that is also supposed to be a profitable business is complicated. Even products designed with the best intentions can start to get twisted when you layer in the need for sustainable revenue. I wrote in detail here about how a team's thought process changes over time as a product evolves into a business. Feel free to dig deeper, but below is a summary chart:
Basically, the process is bookended by an extreme focus on user needs and an extreme focus on business needs, but the in-between space, the gray area of user-adjacent design, represents the space that most of us live in on a daily basis, trying to balance business needs and user needs. It's not an easy line to walk, but if we go on insisting that our process is always user-centered then we are being disingenuous and will be less likely to ask the right questions or push back when necessary. Instead, if we can admit that our process is often “user-adjacent” then we have a more realistic framework through which to evaluate the decisions that are being made.
Jesse