Encounter-moment adequacy
Encounter moment adequacy is a way of evaluating a product step by step rather than as a whole. At each point where the user needs to take a next action, the question is whether what they need is present, recognizable, and within reach from where they actually are at that moment. A polished, comprehensive product can fail this test at one moment; a sparser one can pass at every moment and work.
Definition
The local evaluation criterion for path design: at each route-step in a user's traversal, whether the affordance the user needs to advance is present, reachable, and initiable from the state produced by the prior step.
The user's vantage on the path
The offering's whole-object framing is a provider abstraction. The user experiences the path only at the moments of route traversal — what's in front of them at this step, what they can reach from where they are, what they can initiate from the state the prior step produced. The path's existence as a comprehensive structure is something the provider holds; the user encounters a sequence of moments, each evaluated locally.
Each encounter-moment runs three local checks:
- Present — the affordance the user needs is visible and recognizable at this moment
- Reachable — the user can engage it from their now-state without first having to traverse intermediate steps
- Initiable — the user has the user-side capacity (energy, attention, decisiveness, skills, signal continuity) to actually start the action
All three have to hold at the moment the step is taken, or the path fails at that step regardless of what else is true about the path elsewhere.
Local adequacy decides path success
A path that's comprehensively shaped but has an affordance gap at encounter-moment X fails at X. A path that's sparsely shaped but has the right affordance available at every encounter-moment succeeds. Provider path-shaping earns its value through moment-by-moment availability, not affordance landscape coverage. An affordance that exists somewhere in the offering but isn't present, reachable, or initiable at the moment the user needs it doesn't count toward the path — it's infrastructure that doesn't serve user routes.
This is where the "figure it out" anti-pattern most often hides. An affordance exists; the user just can't get to it from where they are at the moment they need it, so bridging the gap becomes the user's implicit task to solve.
State at the moment of summoning
An affordance that loads is not just present; it loads in some configuration, displaying some content, oriented toward some user-purpose. Encounter-moment adequacy includes whether that configuration matches the route-step that summoned the affordance. When the summoning context is detectable but ignored, adequacy fails through unstated indifference — the user is treated as if they showed up cold rather than as if they showed up for something specific the offering could have inferred. Summoning-aware defaults operationalize this at the affordance-design layer.
Example
A user finishes signing up for a project management tool. The resulting state: an empty workspace. The next step on their critical route is to import their existing data so the tool becomes usable. The "Import from CSV" affordance exists in the offering — it lives in Settings → Data → Import.
The empty workspace shows a "Create your first project" CTA. No surfacing of import, no contextual prompt asking what the user is bringing in. The import affordance is in the landscape and reachable via the menu in principle, but at the encounter-moment of staring at the empty workspace, it isn't present in the user's reach. The user is implicitly asked to figure out that the path forward starts in Settings, not in the workspace they're looking at. Encounter-moment adequacy fails at the post-signup step even though the import affordance exists in the offering.