Landscape architects have a name for the packed-earth shortcut that appears across a lawn where the paved path takes a wider, more official route: a desire line. It's the visible record of hundreds of individual decisions to ignore the designed path in favour of the obvious one, recorded not in a survey but in dead grass.
The classic response: pave the desire line
Some campuses famously wait a full season before pouring permanent paths, letting desire lines emerge naturally and then paving exactly those routes — treating the users' aggregate behaviour as the actual design brief, rather than treating the designer's original guess as something users should be corrected into following. It's a rare, disciplined admission that the population using a space usually understands its own movement better than a plan drawn before anyone had walked it.
Click-paths are desire lines with better data
A scroll-depth chart or a click heatmap on a website is the identical phenomenon with better instrumentation: users ignoring the intended navigation path in favour of whatever route actually gets them to the thing they wanted. The design failure isn't that users went off-path. It's mistaking the paved path for the correct one and treating the worn grass as a problem with the users rather than a problem with the plan.
A desire line is never really a shortcut. It's a correction, filed by everyone who used the space, that nobody in charge has read yet.
The teams that redesign navigation around where clicks actually go, rather than where the sitemap says they should go, are doing exactly what the best campus planners do: paving the path that was already there.