"Through, not to"
"Through, not to" is the claim that every interaction with an offering is the user going *through* it to something else they want, never *to* the offering as the destination. Someone opening a spreadsheet app is trying to get a hiring plan figured out; they didn't show up because they wanted to be in a spreadsheet.
Definition
Every interaction with the offering is the user going through the offering toward something they want, not to the offering itself as a destination.
Every interaction goes through
This is a structural claim with universal scope, not a generalization about typical interactions. Usage itself has this shape: there's no "for its own sake" interaction. Whenever an affordance is encountered, hopscotched toward, used, or returned to, the user has pulled it into a broader route toward something they're trying to accomplish. The user contributes the directional pull; the offering supplies a path the pull traverses.
Goals that look internal
The harder case is when the user's goal appears to live inside the offering. A player pursuing "beat the game" produces an achievement record internal to the game; an artist completing a digital painting produces an artifact that lives inside the software. These cases still go through. The user's pursuit — mastery, completion, the satisfaction of finishing — lives in the user's situation, even when the offering's instrumentation of that pursuit is internal. Where the achievement is recorded and where the goal lives for the user are different things. The user is always going through, regardless of where the offering's measurement happens.
The claim also extends to interactions where the user's intent is unconscious, inarticulable, or counter to stated preferences. Awareness, articulability, and disclosure govern the legibility of the intent, not its existence. Compulsive scrolls and reflexive uses are intent-driven the same way deliberate ones are; the through-not-to shape applies regardless of whether the user could narrate it.
How this shapes proxies and routes
The most direct consequence is on proxy selection. A feature-usage event — "the user did something inside the offering" — fails through-not-to because it measures what happened on the offering's surface, with no claim about what the user was using the offering to pursue. The external-impact event tier is exactly the tier of behaviors that pass through-not-to: behaviors whose completion advances the user's pursuit outside the offering. Hopscotch is through-not-to at the route level — each affordance the user selects is a stop on a route, with the user advancing through it toward the next step.
Example
A user sending an invoice from accounting software is going through the invoice-creation affordance toward something outside the software — the client receives the invoice, pays, the user has revenue. The invoice does real-world work for the user beyond the offering's surface, which is what makes "sent an invoice" a candidate for an outcome proxy.
Compare to "user logged in three times this week." Logging in records the user arriving at the offering; the measurement is presence on the surface. Whatever the user came to accomplish runs off-instrument.