Tools Are Supposed to Get Out of the Way

As the marketing adage goes:

People don’t want a drill. They want a hole in the wall.

The drill is just the tool. The outcome is the job. Nobody wakes up and says, “I’d like to buy a new drill today!” Well, except drill enthusiasts, I suppose. Likewise, nobody wakes up and says, “I’d like to buy a new app... See more

You cannot easily measure the resentment. Or the rage clicks when they smash a button to dismiss another “did you know” pop-up. You cannot easily chart the moment a user thinks, “I used to like this product, and now it feels needy.” You cannot easily quantify the slow erosion of trust.

One of the most bizarre contradictions in modern software is that the people building these engagement systems don’t like them either!

Ask anyone who works on onboarding popups, feature tours, lifecycle messaging, or in-app announcements how they feel when an app interrupts them mid-flow to announce something they didn’t ask for. The answer is... See more

One of the most dangerous things about analytics is that they feel objective. A chart is a chart. A number is a number. They have the aesthetic of truth.

You cannot easily measure the resentment. Or the rage clicks when they smash a button to dismiss another “did you know” pop-up. You cannot easily chart the moment a user thinks, “I used to like this product, and now it feels needy.” You cannot easily quantify the slow erosion of trust.

Metrics don’t measure reality. They measure what your product currently makes easy.

There’s a well-known warning about this, often summarized as: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure . It’s commonly referred to as Goodhart’s Law, and the broader point shows up in multiple fields, because it keeps happening to humans in... See more