Energy
Energy is what a user walks in with: the physical stamina, attention, and motivation they have available to spend. The product doesn't generate any of it; users arrive with a finite supply and spend it as they go. A well-designed tool can make that supply go further by reducing effort or conserving attention, but it can't manufacture more out of nothing.
Definition
Energy is what the user has available to invest in pursuit, present in the user as capacity regardless of which intent is active at any given moment.
The three forms
Energy is a composite of three substrates the user draws on when pursuing a state:
- Metabolic: the physical energy the user has in their body. Sleep, hunger, illness, and time-of-day all affect it.
- Attentional: the user's available focus. Limited at any moment, depleted across a session, replenished across longer cycles.
- Motivational: the drive directed at the particular pursuit. How strongly the user cares about reaching this sought state right now.
The three are distinct. A user can be metabolically rested but attentionally exhausted, or attentionally fresh but motivationally absent for a particular task. Each can fail independently of the others, and each can be the binding constraint at a given moment.
Energy belongs to the user
Energy is user-side. The user brings it to the encounter; the offering doesn't produce it. The energy flow is unidirectional — from the user, through the offering, toward their sought state. The provider's pre-recorded work makes that energy go further than it would unaided; it doesn't add to the supply.
This rules out a class of design moves that treat energy as something the provider can generate. Motivational copy intended to make uninterested users care, gamification meant to manufacture engagement on top of an absent pursuit — these try to inject energy the user didn't arrive with. They produce thin engagement that fades the moment the prop is removed; the user's actual energy supply is unchanged underneath.
How affordances act on energy
Affordances can extend energy (a tool that reduces the effort a step requires) or preserve it (a process that conserves attention by removing decisions the user would otherwise pay for). They cannot create it.
The one literal edge case is food: it adds metabolic energy directly. Outside of that, every operation an offering performs on energy is multiplicative on what the user already has. A faster checkout doesn't give the user more energy; it lowers the energy cost of the checkout step so more of the user's energy is left for what comes next.
Energy within intent
Energy is one of three components that decompose intent, alongside sought state and regulatory mechanism. Each is required: energy without a sought state is undirected; a sought state without energy is inert; both without a regulatory mechanism produce no adjustment when the path stops working. The three together are what makes a user a pursuer rather than a passive entity.
Energy is also one of the factor-types in reachability — whether the user, in their current state, can initiate the next step. Energy can decay over time (a motivational spike that fades between a conversion action and a follow-up email) or be spent up by friction earlier in the route, leaving the user without enough to reach the next step even when everything else is in place.
Example
A user signs up for a project-management tool at 11pm after a long workday. They arrived with a clear sought state (get tomorrow's tasks organized before they go to bed) and enough motivational energy to start. But they're metabolically depleted and attentionally narrowed. An onboarding flow that asks them to invite teammates, configure permissions, and pick a workspace theme spends attentional energy on things that aren't on the critical route to their sought state. By the time they reach task entry, they're under the threshold required to actually do it. The signup completed; the value milestone didn't. Nothing in the offering generated more energy for them — it could only have spent less of what they brought.