Designing for foragers
Information foraging says people navigate the way animals forage — following cues that suggest food is near, abandoning a patch when the return drops below the cost of moving. It isn’t a metaphor so much as the same machinery pointed at a screen.
Which means most navigation problems are scent problems.
Scent is a prediction
A link doesn’t have to describe its destination. It has to let someone predict it well enough to commit. “Settings” carries scent. “More” does not. “Advanced” carries scent for exactly the people who shouldn’t click it.
Scent has to survive the whole path. A label that promises one thing and leads to a page that says something different doesn’t just cost that click — it teaches the user that your labels are unreliable, and after that they stop reading and start guessing. Recovering from that is much harder than getting it right, because the damage is to the whole interface at once.
The cost of exploration matters as much as the cue. If going back is instant and lossless, people probe cheaply and find things. If a wrong click loses their place, their form state, or thirty seconds, they stop probing and start asking a colleague — which reads to you as low engagement and to them as a working strategy.
Labels carry measurably different amounts of scent. “Settings” predicts its destination; “More” predicts nothing and defers the cost to a click; “Advanced” reliably attracts exactly the people who shouldn’t be there, because it reads as a promise of capability rather than a warning. Renaming is the cheapest change available in an interface and routinely outperforms the redesign proposed instead — because the problem was never the layout.
Where it breaks
Foraging describes searching. A good deal of product use isn’t searching.
Someone executing a known workflow for the four-hundredth time isn’t following scent; they’re running a motor program, and the design that serves them — stable positions, no reflow, no helpful reordering — is close to the opposite of what a forager needs. Optimising a daily-use tool for legibility to newcomers degrades it for everyone who stayed.
The model also predicts what people do, not what serves them. Strong scent attracts clicks regardless of whether the destination is worth it, which is precisely the mechanic behind every headline written to be clicked rather than read. “Align with human instincts” and “exploit human instincts” are the same technique with different intent, and the interface cannot tell them apart. Only you can, and only before you build it.
Foraging heuristics evolved for patchy, honest environments. They are badly calibrated for one where the cues are authored by someone with an interest in where you go.
Takeaway: align product flows with human instincts.