Route efficacy
Route efficacy is how well a route serves what the user is trying to accomplish. It's a property of the whole route rather than of any single step or tool along it: how coherently the steps fit together, whether the user has what they need to take each one, and whether the means available at each step fit what they're doing. It runs on a scale, with the floor being whatever the user could accomplish on their own using substitutes or improvisation.
Definition
The quality of a route as a vehicle for the user's pursuit — how effectively traversing the route advances the user toward their sought state.
Route in relation to pursuit
Route efficacy names a relation between the route and the user's pursuit at the moment of traversal. The same route can be highly efficacious for one user pursuing one intent and poorly efficacious for another user pursuing a different intent. Change the pursuit and the efficacy reconstitutes against the new intent.
It's a route-level property, not a step-level or affordance-level one. Individual steps and affordances contribute to route efficacy but don't carry it themselves. A route can be made up of well-built affordances and still be poorly efficacious if their ordering doesn't compose toward the sought state, or if a step in the middle isn't reachable from the state produced by the previous step.
It's gradient, not binary. Routes are more or less efficacious, evaluated against the user's pursuit and against the alternatives the user could reach for instead.
Three contributing factors
Route efficacy is produced by three factors operating together:
- Step-ordering and transformation-chain coherence. The route's sequence of steps has to compose toward the sought state — each step's resulting state has to be a viable starting state for the next. A well-built individual step in the wrong position doesn't add efficacy; it can subtract it.
- Reachability at each step. The user has to be able to initiate each step from the state the previous step left them in, with the energy, attention, skill, and conditions they actually have at that moment. A step that's correctly ordered but unreachable for the cohort arriving at it breaks the route there.
- Affordance availability and fit. At each step, the affordances the user can reach have to fit the pursuit at that step — recognizable, reachable, and well-matched to what the user is trying to do. Affordances that miss the moment, or fit weakly, drag route efficacy down regardless of how comprehensive the path is overall.
The factors don't combine additively. A single failure on any of them can collapse efficacy for the whole downstream route — single-elimination stakes carries the consequence forward.
Baseline and improvement
Every user pursuing an intent has a baseline route efficacy: what they could achieve on alternative routes available to them — substitute affordances, pen-and-paper, improvisation, third-party tools, not-doing-it-at-all. The baseline is rarely zero. Users have ways of pursuing their intents before any specific offering enters the picture.
What providers add — and what they capture margin on — is the improvement over baseline that traversing the offering's path produces. The provider doesn't capture value on the pursuit itself; the pursuit is the user's. The provider captures on the delta between the user's baseline efficacy and the user's efficacy when integrating the offering's affordances into their pursuit. This is the structural basis for margin-on-efficacy.
The gradient design targets
Because route efficacy is gradient and evaluated against alternatives, design work targets the gradient rather than a threshold. Every affordance the team builds has to fit the user's pursuit more strongly than what the user would otherwise reach for at that step — including other affordances in the offering, third-party tools, user-improvised substitutes, and not-doing-it.
Users select at each step among the alternatives reachable to them, and their hopscotch selections reveal where the offering's route efficacy is winning the comparison and where it isn't. Hopscotch-past behavior — users observably routing around a provider-supplied affordance — is direct evidence that the route efficacy at that step is losing to an alternative.
Example
A user in their first session with an email marketing tool wants to send a campaign to their subscriber list. Two routes are available to them. The baseline route is improvising: export contacts from somewhere, write the email in their regular client, hit BCC, hope for the best, have no idea who opened anything. The offering's path routes them through import contacts → pick a template → edit the content → send to the list → see opens and clicks.
The offering's route efficacy beats the baseline to the degree that three conditions hold. The steps compose — imported contacts produce the list state the campaign editor expects, the template editor produces content the send step can transmit. Each step is reachable for a first-session user — the import doesn't require knowledge they don't have, the template doesn't require copy decisions they aren't ready to make. The affordances at each step fit the pursuit — the template gallery surfaces options for their use case, the editor handles list personalization without their having to think about it.
If any of those breaks down — say, the import requires a CSV format the user can't produce from their existing list — the route efficacy collapses at that step, and the user defects to improvising. The offering's path is a series of bets that each step's route efficacy beats whatever the user would have done instead.