Funnels, Tubes, and Spaces

An easy way to rethink your design.

This has quickly become my most popular design suggestion, and now it's a shareable video. It’s about splitting your project into funnels, tubes, and spaces.

Funnels

I call something a funnel if it gets everybody to do the same thing, or working on the same goal. By this definition, the checkout area in a supermarket is a funnel. So are many organizations. There's one goal for everyone.

Tubes

Similarly, I'll call something a tube if it gets people from where they are to their own goal. So Amazon, and all marketplaces, are tubes. So are Google searches. Tubes accelerate everyone to their own goal.

Both are goal-driven things, that everyone involved would accelerate if they could—to get the goal accomplished more quickly.

Spaces

Many entrepreneurs see all design tasks as funnels and tubes. But that’s a big mistake.

Some things aren't designed around goals at all. Instead, they are about values, or exploration according to values. I'll call those exploratory spaces.

Spaces aren't goal-driven. You know something is a space if you don't want it to be over quickly. You'd accelerate an Amazon purchase, or an uber ride, or an organizational goal. The things you do in a space are things that you would not accelerate.

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In modern societies, funnels and tubes have scaled up, but spaces declined. Why?

• Markets, recommender systems, and even voting systems are biased against spaces.

• Design processes like UX and mechanism design are about funnels and tubes, not spaces.

• Success in spaces is also harder to measure than in funnels and tubes.

This caused our societies to turn away from spaces, but we can turn back! And that will restore social trust, repair institutions, increase productivity in science, and more!

You can learn more in my upcoming talk, in the free textbook, or…