Design and implementation of the functional: trodden paths and paved paths

I want to start by describing one case:

Svyatoslav Fyodorov personally supervised the construction of his hospital. And instead of thinking over the location of the tracks and asphalt them in advance, he waited for the people to walk along the paths where they were comfortable walking. Then it remains to simply pave the track on the site of the paths.

Think about it and remember how many times you have seen in idiotically paved paths and paths that people tread around, as they like.
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Why it happens? Because some bad designers are simply not able to predict the needs of the people . And because some needs are generally very difficult to predict even to good designers.

Conclusion : it is necessary to make every effort to correctly predict the needs of users, but at the same time closely monitor their actual interaction with the designed system and be ready to fix this system.

Unfortunately, many people do not just lay paths in an idiotic way in advance, but also resent because people walk where they are comfortable, put up fences, plow paths and re-plant a lawn, etc.

The most interesting thing is that often not only and not so much designers and developers (architects, landscape designers, workers, paved paths, etc.), but also some simple users (same pedestrians, who believe that the paths are laid so even if it is inconvenient, it is necessary to walk precisely on them, look askance or express their indignation more freedom-loving).

An example of how to act according to the described approach:

Offtop in blogs and forums

It has long been the case that people in forums and blogs often switch from discussing a post to talking to extraneous topics. Because they are so comfortable.

Actions of designers: complete misunderstanding and ignoring the problem.

The actions of some users: a reminder that you need to walk along the paved paths, albeit inconvenient. From unobtrusive to categorical, up to the ban.

Problem solving: to provide users with a simple and convenient way to go offline, allowing them to continue the conversation without disturbing the others.

Give users the ability to mark the discussion thread as offtopic. To enable the moderator to do this forcibly.

Make two options for leaving offtopic: private, when the branch is no longer visible to everyone else, and public, when the branch is marked as offtopic, stops showing by default, but if you want, you can expand and read it.

Make the possibility of returning from the offtopic: it may happen that in the process of going far to the side of the discussion something important will be born for the main topic. It is necessary to provide the same simple opportunity, from this time on, to again make the discussion accessible to the public.

To make it possible to take the branched discussion into a separate topic, note, keeping all messages and structure. (I know that something like this exists as a plugin for phpBB.)

This is a fairly simple solution that is quite feasible at this level of technology development at low cost.

The ideal solution could, for example, include the complete integration of forums, blogs, mail, instant messengers into a single system with the mutual connections of parts and the possibility of a simple transition from one means to another. But this is a separate topic, a great job and the work of the future.

The designer must be more modest and not assume that he is able to predict everything. But still continue to make maximum effort.

You must be attentive to the behavior of users and are ready to make appropriate changes to the product.