Set aside any images of your dysfunctional (or highly functional—lucky you!) childhood home. Now imagine your ideal home. What comes to mind? A Saltbox? American Craftsman? Converted warehouse loft? A child’s pointy box with two rectangular windows and puffs of smoke emanating from a chimney? What would your ideal home look like if you were from Burkina Faso, Telluride, or the 18th Century?

Anyone’s guess, I guess.

How would you define the ideal home if you couldn’t describe it in physical terms? You might describe how the ideal home would make you feel. Home as a place of peace and comfort, a welcoming place where your needs are met, your safety and security are ensured, and where you feel respected, appreciated, cared for — even celebrated. A place that’s well-designed, where things work as they should, and where there’s a natural flow between centers of activity and calm.

You’d probably describe a kind of Platonic ideal for home-ness, a set of characteristics shared by almost anyone from any region, culture, or era, whether that’s Burkina Faso, Telluride, or the 18th Century.

Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
— Requiem, Robert Louis Stevenson

Maybe it was that brief time when I thought I’d become an architect (I wanted to design Eichlers, not skyscrapers), but I like to think of home as a foundational heuristic for useful, usable, pleasant experiences, a heuristic that underpins the design, development, and measurement of everything from features to functions, user journeys to usability.

I didn’t end up designing homes, though. I ended up designing products. Digital Products. Digital Product Experiences! In other words, websites, apps, and other chunks of interface and code. Ours is a field dedicated to using complex terms to describe simple things. Even the word heuristic is just a fancy-pants way of saying a mental shortcut or rule of thumb that simplifies the process of evaluating user experiences. Saying heuristic instead of rule of thumb, however, sounds science-y, lending an air of credibility to our ramblings.

Here’s a completely incomplete and unordered list of characteristics that I jotted down in two minutes that, taken together, form a kind of heuristic for home:

• Safe

• Trustworthy

• Familiar

• Reassuring

• Comforting

• Calm

• Welcoming

• Supportive

• Empowering

• Stable

• Caring

• Secure

Seems like a pretty obvious and broad list. So obvious and broad as to be useless as a tool for evaluation, right? “Who wouldn’t design things this way?” To that I’d say, “Have you used many apps or websites lately?”

Every day, product teams churn out galaxies of pixels that, in ways small and large, run counter to some (if not most) of those characteristics. Whenever you hear a colleague say, “We need users to <insert action that benefits the business>,” buckle up. What they say next is likely to be a solution that feels nothing like home.

I’m not talking about dark patterns, per se. Obviously those run counter to home as a heuristic. I’m talking about all the little ways we’re asked or inclined to ignore the characteristics that define home—even when we think we’re doing something helpful.

Yes, even teams with honorable intentions can create user experiences that feel awful. Every time you’re stopped dead in your tracks by a CAPTCHA, cookie notification, or GDPR disclosure, you can thank a group of well-intentioned people who destroyed a noble idea with an execution that feels hostile—and nothing like home.

But somewhere in the gulf between dark patterns and good intentions poorly executed lie the vast majority of crummy experiences we foist upon our hapless users. Sometimes we know we’re screwing up, sometimes we don’t. The common thread in both intentional and unintentional screwups, however, is usually a simple failure to ask whether or not we’ve created an experience that lives up to the ideals of home.

I got into this business because I wanted to make things that were useful, usable, and delightful. You probably did, too. Of course, we’re told, we also need to “keep the lights on.” Keeping the lights on is a euphemism that often means, “Hey, look over there while we do this thing people may not really like, but which ensures we remain employed.” If they’re clever, they’ll use a euphemism like gamification to cover their tracks. “Sure, we’re asking for sensitive data, but it’ll be fun!” Would your home be gamified?

There are a set of never-ending battles to be fought. Having to explain the value of design, for example. Or the necessity of user research. Add “Keeping the lights on without treating our users like lab rats or exploitable assets” to the list. It’s harder work and the results might be a bit less noticeable in the short term. But product teams that violate home as a heuristic on a regular basis usually find themselves with very unhappy users—or no users at all.

Some teams think they’re immune from such misfortunes because they have a captive audience. That word—captive—tells you everything you need to know about how they’re inclined to act upon the authentic wants and needs of their users. Teams who believe they have a captive audience are a lot more likely to construct cages than homes.

Home as a heuristic is always floating around my brain when I’m working on a product problem. Whether I’m writing a brief, reviewing work in progress, or thinking about considerations for user research, home is always there, operating at an almost subconscious level.

I haven’t really shared this idea for a while—certainly not this publicly. I used to talk about it a lot, but I found some colleagues took it a bit too literally. “We’re designing a sign-up flow. It’s not supposed to feel like home.”

Others pointed out (a bit more astutely, perhaps) that home as a heuristic isn’t nearly as contextually appropriate as, say, Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design, Don Norman’s seven design principles for usability, or Dieter Rams’ Ten principles for good design.

I agree. Those heuristics should get baked into our brains, too. We should be able to assess at a glance whether a proposed design offers sufficient affordance or discoverability or is appropriately unobtrusive. These heuristics (and more) should factor into any kind of formal analysis or research study.

Underpinning many of these heuristics are foundational rules and paradigms like those outlined in Jon Yablonski’s outstanding Laws of UX, not to mention a boatload of design-specific psychological principles we should familiarize ourselves with.

But home as a heuristic is like muscle memory for me. Instinctual. I don’t even need to think about it to call it up, to use it when making design decisions or evaluating the design decisions of others. It operates like hard-wiring or RAM—instantly there, ready to use. In fact, another reason I don’t discuss it much is that it’s so fundamental to the way I analyze things, it feels like explaining a circle. Maybe that’s just the nature of a Platonic ideal.

Maybe I just post-rationalized this innate heuristic—calling it home—in order to make it a mnemonic, to give it a handle. Calling it home makes it an immediately recognizable and obvious metaphor. Home as a fundamental guiding principle, North Star, yardstick, beacon, paradigm, Platonic ideal, heuristic. It’s simple and broad enough to be drawn upon with no cognitive effort, but specific enough to be practical in almost any scenario.