Your product needs a weenie, not another priority.
A useful product gives people something clear to gravitate towards. Define that focal point before secondary features turn the experience into a queue.
Most products do not need another feature competing for attention. They need one thing that gives the rest of the experience a direction.
We have borrowed a term from theme-park design for that thing: the weenie. It sounds unserious. The decision behind it is not. A product, website or brand needs a clear focal point that people can gravitate towards without first understanding every part of the system. Without one, teams try to do too many things and end up solving none of them particularly well.
A weenie gives the whole experience a direction
Walt Disney used the idea of a “weenie” when thinking about the tentpole attractions around which a theme park could be organised. It is a playful word for a serious design decision: where should people go, and what should draw them there?
For a digital product, the weenie is the task you want people to gravitate towards. On a website, it may be the action the whole journey supports. For a brand, it may be the recognisable idea that people should encounter again and again.
That does not mean every screen needs an enormous button pointing at the same destination. The focal point can show up through navigation, hierarchy, copy and the order in which information appears. It can also shape less visible decisions, including which features receive attention and which ones wait.
A weenie is not decoration. A large illustration, animated banner or clever interaction can attract attention without helping anyone decide what to do. The internet has enough animated buttons already.
The distinction is intent. Decoration says, “Look here.” A useful focal point says, “Start here, because this is why the product exists.”
A product with 10 priorities does not have a focal point. It has a queue.
Too many priorities leave users to organise the product
Teams rarely struggle because they have no ideas. The harder problem is deciding which idea gets to organise the rest.
A product can reasonably support several tasks. A hotel website may include room information, property details and offers alongside booking. An app for braais may need profiles, invitations and supporting information. Those features can all be useful without carrying equal weight.
Trouble starts when every stakeholder’s priority reaches the interface at full volume. The homepage promotes several competing actions. Navigation reflects the organisation rather than the user’s task. New features get added because there is space for them, not because they support the main reason people arrived.
A product with 10 priorities does not have a focal point. It has a queue.
Choosing a weenie forces an uncomfortable conversation. If creating a braai is the central action, another feature may need to become secondary. If booking is the point of a hotel website, content should help someone move towards or confidently away from that decision. It should not make them hunt through the organisation’s internal structure first.
Braai League and City Lodge had different focal points
Braai League and City Lodge show how the same principle can guide very different experiences.
For Braai League, we made creating and viewing braais the app’s tentpole. That gave the product a centre of gravity. Other parts of the experience could be considered according to whether they helped people create a braai, see one or understand what was happening around it. The Braai League case study covers the wider work, but the useful lesson is simple: the product needed to remain about braais rather than becoming a collection of adjacent social features.
For the City Lodge website, the focal point was booking. Hotel information still mattered because people need enough context to choose where to stay. But the experience had a clear job: help someone move from considering a property towards making a booking.
This is a statement about the intended design hierarchy, not a claim that every visitor completed the main task. People will arrive with different needs, and some will decide not to proceed. A clear focal point does not remove those behaviours. It stops the interface from making the decision harder than it already is.
The City Lodge case study provides more context on that website. Read alongside Braai League, it shows that a weenie is not a particular component or visual style. It is the decision that tells the components and style what they are there to support.
You can test the focal point before redesigning everything
Finding a weenie does not require a lengthy naming exercise. Start with a sentence that describes the behaviour the product should make easiest: “When someone uses this product, we most want them to…”
Complete it without using “and”. That small restriction matters. “Create a braai and browse events and update a profile and invite friends” is a backlog wearing a sentence as a disguise. Pick the action that gives the other actions a reason to exist.
Then work through these questions:
- What is the single task people should recognise first?
- Which page, screen or message currently gives that task the most weight?
- What competes with it for attention?
- Which secondary features directly support it?
- What could move later in the journey without preventing the main task?
- If the focal action disappeared, would the product still have the same reason to exist?
Do not settle the argument by asking which option people like. Test the task instead. Give someone the relevant page or prototype and ask them to begin the central action. Watch where they look first, what they think the product is for and which competing element pulls them away. A preference can tell you whether they like a button. Their behaviour can show whether the product has direction. If you only have an existing interface, run the same review internally before commissioning new work. Cover the page title and ask what the layout appears to prioritise. Compare that answer with the sentence you wrote. Any gap gives you somewhere concrete to start.
On Monday, ask everyone responsible for the product to complete the same sentence: “When someone uses this, we most want them to…” Compare the answers before discussing new features or visual changes.
If the answers differ, that is the work. Agree on one focal action, identify what currently competes with it and test whether someone can find it without an explanation. Give the product a weenie before giving it anything else.
