Technology keeps getting better at removing friction from our lives. But as we optimize for speed and convenience, are there other things worth optimizing for too?
I love efficiency.
As a product person, I’ve spent much of my career thinking about how to make things easier, faster and more intuitive. Remove unnecessary steps. Reduce friction. Help people accomplish what they came to do.
Technology has become remarkably good at this.
We can have groceries delivered without going to the store. Dinner can arrive from a neighborhood restaurant without us ever walking through its door. Amazon can bring something to our house that we previously would have driven across town to buy.
These are genuinely useful products solving real problems. And I don’t think we’re going backward.
But lately I’ve been thinking about the ripple effects of efficiency.
Most of them aren’t obvious to the person benefiting from the convenience.
When I have dinner delivered, I save time. But I also don’t walk into the restaurant, talk to the owner, recognize another customer or have one of those seemingly insignificant interactions that, collectively, help create a community.
One interaction doesn’t matter much.
Thousands of them do.
That doesn’t mean we should stop using delivery apps or start intentionally making technology less efficient. That would be unrealistic—and, frankly, not very good product thinking.
The more interesting question is:
Can we keep the efficiency while designing for some of the ripple effects?
Google Maps is an interesting example.
Google Maps is an extraordinary product.
It takes an incredibly complicated problem—getting millions of people from point A to point B—and makes it feel almost effortless.
Traffic gets bad on a major street? Maps finds another route.
Sometimes that alternative route runs through a residential neighborhood and saves the driver a few minutes.
From the driver's perspective, the product worked perfectly.
But zoom out a little.
If thousands of drivers are routed through that same neighborhood over time, there can be a ripple effect. A residential street gradually becomes a cut-through. The people who actually live there begin adjusting to the additional traffic. Parents may become a little more cautious about kids playing out front. Walking the dog feels different. Pulling out of the driveway gets harder.
No individual driver intended any of that.
They're simply following the route the product recommended.
And the product isn't doing anything wrong. It is optimizing for what we've traditionally asked navigation software to optimize for: getting us where we're going efficiently.
But here's where I think it gets interesting from a product-design perspective.
Google already gives us another kind of choice.
Google Maps has already demonstrated that routing doesn't have to optimize around a single objective.
Its eco-friendly routing feature can highlight a route with a green leaf based on estimated fuel or energy efficiency. Google says these routes consider factors including traffic, road type and elevation, with the goal of reducing fuel or energy consumption and associated emissions.
I think that's excellent product thinking.
Google isn't telling the user, You must take this route.
It's saying, essentially:
Here's another option, and here's why you might care about it. You decide.
So what if we applied the same thinking at a much more local level?
What about a “Community-Friendly” route?
Imagine opening Google Maps and seeing another routing option:
Community-Friendly
Instead of prioritizing every available shortcut, that route could favor arterial and collector roads designed to handle through traffic and, where reasonable, avoid sending drivers through residential streets simply to shave a small amount of time off the trip.
Maybe the fastest route takes 24 minutes.
The community-friendly route takes 26.
Show me the difference and let me decide.
Personally, if two minutes means avoiding an unnecessary cut-through through someone's neighborhood, I'd choose the community-friendly route without thinking twice.
Someone else might choose the fastest route.
That's okay.
The goal isn't to make the decision for people. It's to give them the option.
That's what I find compelling about this idea.
Nothing about the core Google Maps experience needs to be torn down. The fastest route remains available. Eco-friendly routing remains available. We're simply expanding what the product allows people to optimize for.
Speed.
Fuel consumption.
Environmental impact.
And perhaps, someday, community.
Maybe efficiency doesn't always have to win by default.
This isn't really a post about Google Maps.
Maps just provides a useful example of a much larger product question.
Technology will continue making our lives more efficient—and it should.
But efficiency inevitably creates ripple effects, and those effects aren't always captured by the metrics we traditionally optimize around.
Sometimes they're environmental.
Sometimes they're economic.
And sometimes they're human.
The opportunity for product designers isn't necessarily to eliminate those tradeoffs. It may simply be to recognize them and, when possible, give people a meaningful choice.
Google's green leaf is a great example of that philosophy already in practice. It asks us to consider something beyond getting there fastest.
So I keep coming back to the same question:
If we can design technology that lets people choose what's better for the environment, where else could we give them the choice to do what's better for their community?
Maybe the next generation of great products won't just ask:
How can we make this more efficient?
Maybe they'll also ask:
What happens because we did?
