Sought state
A sought state is the situation a user is moving toward. It belongs to the user and exists before any product enters the picture. Someone who wants hot coffee is pursuing that destination whether they reach for a kettle, a pod machine, or a coffee shop.
Definition
The state a user's intent is directed toward — what they're moving toward, conscious or not, articulable or not.
A property of the user
Sought state belongs to the user, not to any particular transition the offering supplies. It's a feature of the user's directedness — present in the user before they encounter any specific offering, and persisting whether or not any offering ever well-aligns to it. A person wanting their lawn mowed has the sought state "lawn mowed" whether they hire a service, do it themselves, or never get around to it.
Sought state is one of the three components the intent mechanism decomposes into: energy is what the user brings, sought state is where it's directed, and the regulatory mechanism is what tracks whether the current path is producing progress toward it. Sought state names the directional target; without it, energy is undirected.
Distinct from resulting state
Resulting state is transition-side: the terminus of a particular named transition, defined by completion criteria. Sought state is user-side: where the user's energy is pointed, independent of any transition the offering provides.
The two coincide when a transition is named such that its resulting state matches the user's sought state. That coincidence is something intent-aligned design produces; the framework doesn't presuppose it. A transition has a resulting state whether or not that state serves any user; a user has sought states whether or not any transition reaches them. Collapsing the two terms loses the framework's ability to evaluate whether a transition serves the user at all.
The send-invoice / get-paid pair makes the gap visible. An invoicing tool can name its transition "invoice sent" and complete it reliably. But the user's sought state is usually "client paid" — invoice-sent is a sub-transition, not the destination. If the offering treats "invoice sent" as the resulting state and stops there, the user is left with their pursuit unfulfilled even though the transition succeeded by its own definition.
Conscious or not
A user's sought state exists regardless of whether they're aware of it or able to put it into words. Awareness, articulability, and willingness to disclose are three separate axes governing how legible a sought state is — not whether it exists. Compulsive scrolls, reflexive interactions, and uses the user reflectively wishes they weren't engaging in are all sought-state-directed; what varies across them is the user's relationship to their own pursuit, not the operativeness of the pursuit itself.
The apparatus a provider builds to detect intent — intent detection, behavioral signal reading, qualitative investigation — has to read directedness, since users can't always state their sought state plainly.
Example
A user signing up for a calendar-scheduling tool has the sought state "meeting scheduled with the prospect" — energy directed at getting a specific person onto their calendar at a specific time.
The user might describe what they want as "stop the back-and-forth emails" or "make booking easier." The directional target is still the meeting; the descriptions are how the user has named the friction they currently feel, not the state they're moving toward. The scheduling tool can complete a transition whose resulting state is "scheduling link sent" and treat that as the end of the work. But if the prospect never replies, the user's sought state isn't reached — the transition succeeded by its own definition while leaving the user's pursuit unresolved.