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Back to BlogOn Folk Interactions<br>UI/UXDesignSoftwareCulture<br>Posted July 18, 2026 / Last edited: August 5, 2026

On Folk Interactions<br>Zooming in on the dramatically-lit entrance to Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery<br>3 years ago, iOS 17 included a new feature when zooming images in the Photos app: a little “Crop” button in the top-right.<br>When I first noticed this, I was amused and delighted, because I had seen many people zooming-then-screenshotting in order to crop a photo, and done the same myself.<br>It’s easy to look down upon these kinds of things when you know the “correct” way to do it. And the “correct” way, in this case, is not exactly hard, per se; you’re supposed to tap the “Adjust” button, then enter the “Crop” mode, where you have a full interactive UI for cropping.<br>A typical “Desire Path,” from the Wikipedia entry, by dankeck<br>And it’s funny, because that method of screenshot-to-crop is essentially the digital equivalent of a “Desire Path”—when a path is so useful that it doesn’t matter that it’s not paved, and people are going to keep walking there until you physically force them to stop.<br>💡<br>Note that I don’t actually know if Apple added the crop button as a specific response to the screenshotting behavior, I’m inferring causality here, though it may not actually matter.

It turns out there are a lot of cases of these Digital Desire Paths. A 2024 information systems paper even uses the term “digital desire paths” for workplace workarounds.<br>We can think of the comparison like this:<br>Design<br>User behavior<br>Designed path<br>Open image → tap Adjust button → tap Crop button → crop → save<br>Desire path<br>Pinch until the screen shows the desired framing → screenshot<br>“Paved” path<br>Pinch until the screen shows the desired framing → tap Crop<br>But there are a whole bunch of other examples in surprisingly different contexts, using surprisingly varied methods, going back way before the invention of the smartphone.<br>If you’re old enough, you probably remember initiating a collect telephone call, cramming “mompracticeisoverpickmeup!!” in when they ask you to state who’s calling, then hanging up, saving yourself a quarter or three.<br>Today we might call something like that a “life hack,” and there are a million of them, extending arbitrarily far throughout human history. Here’s another fun one: before envelopes were mass-produced, writers of letters began developing techniques for folding and tucking the letter sheets themselves into a secure, self-contained, mailable object. This practice of “Letterlocking” even evolved security systems, with certain folds and seals that could reveal whether the message had been opened.

Folk Interactions<br>I’m not here to talk about life hacks, though. I want to focus on a set of practices that we’ll call “Folk Interactions.” Roughly, a folk interaction is an act or procedure invented by users and transmitted socially that repurposes existing features or side-effects in unintended or unexpected ways.<br>💡<br>HCI researchers have been studying this subject for decades, under terminology such as technology appropriation, workarounds, and design-in-use. I’m using “folk interactions” here to refer specifically to recognizable procedures or conventions that spread among users and communities—hence “folk.”

Let’s look at some other examples.

@s and #s<br>When Twitter launched in 2006 (after being renamed from Twttr), it did not feature any built-in mention, reply, or hashtag systems.<br>However, people wanted to be able to mention specific other users. So people began using @username in tweets to address others. For a while, this was just an emergent practice; they were still just strings with no actual additional functionality. It wasn’t until later that Twitter formalized this practice with clickable mentions, replies, and notifications.<br>Similarly, in 2007, web marketing specialist Chris Messina proposed to Twitter—in person, by walking into their office—that they use a # to “create groups of related Tweets.” Twitter did not immediately jump on this idea, but they didn’t need to. Chris and many, many others started doing it anyway, and in 2009 it too was formalized.

Bumps<br>Here’s another common internet practice: the forum “bump.” You want your post to show up at the top again? Didn’t get the attention you thought it deserved? Just reply to your own thread!

If you’ve spent any time on the internets, you’re nearly guaranteed to have encountered this. As far back as 2000 (and certainly before that), forum users and mods have been arguing about bumping.<br>This simple idea didn’t start with a name; it had to be invented. The first coinage is probably lost to history, but there are other vocabularies, such as up, TTT, and ^.<br>Some forum software now offers explicit buttons that afford this or similar functionality, but interestingly, they simply don’t need to.<br>There are so many more examples: like texting yourself as the fastest way to jot down something...