Concerning Intended Use

anthony ilukwe
Product Coalition
Published in
2 min readSep 20, 2020

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In the lifecycle of many a technology product, comes a point when users — deliberately or accidentally — start, en masse, to use it in ways that diverge from its original purpose or design.

This poses a dilemma for its creators — many of whom are Product Managers or executives at tech companies.

This dilemma can be highly consequential, and can come with tremendous rewards — positive and negative. An example is Twitter’s retweet button, which was created in response to users manually writing “RT” in front of another user’s tweet. (A lot of tweeting was done via SMS back in its early days, for those who remember.)

The Retweet button (in addition to Facebook’s Like) largely contributed to the concept of virality on social platforms, and, in addition to the proliferation of ads and content recommendations, accelerated their evolution from social networking platforms to social media platforms.

Another example is Instagram. The original version of Instagram was a chronological feed of instantly posted pictures the of interesting / unique things people were doing, in the moment.

And then came #latergram photos — people posting pictures retroactively (a behaviour that has now become the norm and given users more freedom to curate their own story and expression to the world).

It goes beyond business metrics — it’s a choice between your vision and the user’s vision; direction and expression: to follow the crowd, or lead the crowd.

Back then it was unusual to post pictures from the past. After all, everyone had their actual photo albums in places like Facebook, Google Photos, and Flickr.

Instagram recognized this pattern of user behaviour and productized it, as smart companies do. Especially if it’s a B2C product. Observe user behaviour and non supported use cases; then iterate the product to remove points of friction and optimize the user journey.

Instagram is now the de-facto photo picture sharing app for an entire generation, with many people virtually abandoning posting pictures on Google Photos and Facebook.

It pays off to learn from, and optimize, user behaviour and patterns. We should also consider the potential consequences of doing so.

Anthony Ilukwe is a Product Lead at Unity Technologies.

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Product Management. Unity Technologies / Canadian International Council