User value
User value is what a person gets from using a product, reaching outcomes faster or with less effort than they'd have managed alone. The value lives in those outcomes, the things the person came to accomplish; the product's features are what help produce them.
Definition
User value is the progress a user makes toward their sought state — value produced in the user's own pursuit, which the offering's affordances help along but don't supply.
What user value consists of
User value isn't a single quantity. It shows up in three forms, all tied to the user's own activity rather than to anything the offering possesses:
- Sought-state attainment — the outcome the user came for: the invoice sent, the workout completed, the project shipped.
- Route-efficacy improvement — reaching that outcome with less effort or friction than the user's own baseline, or reaching it at all when they couldn't before.
- Intent satisfaction across scales — value the user produces at the interaction, session, and lifetime scales of their activity, not only at the final outcome.
The first names what the user gets; the second names the improved efficiency of getting there; the third names that this happens at every scale the user's activity unfolds across, not just at the finish.
The user produces the value
User value is the user's progress itself. The offering's affordances help the user produce that progress, but the offering doesn't hand the value over, and the user's clicks and inputs don't add up to it on their own. A workout app doesn't deliver fitness; the user produces it by working out, and the app's affordances make that pursuit more efficient. The unit of value is the user's progression through their pursuit, not the offering and not its features.
Every interaction is the user going through, not to the offering — through it, toward something else they actually want. That structural fact is why user value can never be located in a feature. The feature is part of the path; the value is the distance the user travels along it.
Paired with business value
User value is one of two value streams a self-serve offering has to produce from the same user-side energy. Its counterpart is business value — the provider's commercial return for helping the user along. The two are joined only by design, never automatically, which is what the double-value problem names: the user has to produce both streams, and the provider's job is to keep them coupled so that user progress routes through commercial outcomes rather than dribbling away as engagement that never pays.
When that coupling holds, the higher-value conversion reflects a user whose sought state the offering served more fully — not a user the offering reached deeper into. User value is the half that has to be real first; the business value binds to it or breaks.
Example
Someone signs up for an invoicing tool to bill a client. The user value isn't the invoice template, the send button, or the dashboard — those are affordances. The user value is the invoice actually reaching the client and getting paid, produced with less effort than the spreadsheet-and-email process the user ran before.
If the features sit unused, or the user fights them and ends up sending the invoice through their old method anyway, no user value was produced through the offering. The progress still happened — the invoice went out — but the offering wasn't the path it traveled, so there's nothing for business value to couple to.