Once I started paying attention, I stopped being able to unsee how much product design depends on assumptions about the user.
Not just functional assumptions — but behavioral ones.
What someone has time for. What someone is willing to learn. How much effort someone is expected to invest before getting value.
In theory, most consumer products are designed to help people.
In practice, they often require people to become a specific version of themselves in order to be helped.
This shows up very clearly in consumer apps.
The surface layer looks welcoming. The branding is clean. The language is friendly. The interfaces are polished.
But underneath that surface, the structure is often the same:
You are asked to identify as a type of user before the product can serve you properly.
A person with routines, time, and a stable enough context to engage with a system consistently.
If you fit the model, the product works well. If you don't, the experience becomes friction.
What I started noticing is that this isn't a design flaw in isolated products. It's a pattern that comes from optimization.
When products are optimized for engagement, retention, or conversion, they tend to favor behaviors that are consistent, predictable, and high-signal. That naturally pushes design toward users who behave consistently.
But most real behavior is not consistent. It is fragmented. Context-dependent. Time-constrained. Often intentionally low-effort.
The result is a quiet mismatch between what products are designed for and how people actually use them.
Nowhere is this more visible than in categories where identity and daily life overlap — food being one of them.
A lot of food apps don't just suggest meals. They suggest a way of being.
Cook more. Plan ahead. Optimize nutrition. Build habits. Improve yourself.
None of these are inherently wrong goals. But they assume a level of bandwidth that people don't always have in the moment they are making decisions.
So what gets built is often not a tool for the present self. It's a tool for an improved self.
And the gap between those two is where products start to feel unintuitive, or abandoned, or overcomplicated for what they are trying to solve.
I don't think people are rejecting these products because they lack discipline. I think they are rejecting the requirement to become someone else in order to use them.
That question became the starting point for Girl Dinner Mode.
What if a product assumed the user didn't need to change first?
What if usefulness didn't require identity alignment?
What if the system didn't ask for commitment before offering relief?
I don't think this is just a food question. It's a design question.
About what we assume people are capable of in the exact moment they open a product.
And whether we design for that moment — or for an idealized version of it.