Visual Interface Anchors

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Operating a user interface includes plenty of repetition. Partly because we are prone to forming habits as humans, and partly because our sense of ease is tied to the level of familiarity we perceive. Put simply, if we can always take short, familiar routes to get to the functions we need, we start to feel quite comfortable in our digital environment.

We as humans are also easily stimulated by visual elements. Images and icons can be customized to have a wide appeal across languages and cultures, while complex terms can be hard to make stick in our brains. This is especially so with less technically minded users trying to use their applications because their priority is to get things done and not commit hard-to-understand material to memory.

Combining these two notions is the key to understanding and utilizing what we are calling visual interface anchors.


This idea is something that kept coming up when developing the user experience of Capacic as a platform. As user interface elements and icons are retained from one version to another, users become accustomed to certain images and visual elements corresponding to specific things. Our goal is to make sure that they can find the aforementioned short, familiar routes to where they need to go.

This means that we have to make strong decisions with the pictures and icons we choose. As an interface element gets cemented as a symbol for something, it's hard to change that association. This also applies to the location of these elements as well, as in our minds even digital spaces translate to environments with tangible dimensions and locations. If, as users, we remember that, say, a hard hat-looking settings menu icon was in a particular spot on the bottom right corner of a page, in our minds we instinctively reach toward it and expect to find it there.

The reason this is important is that there is a very effective feedback loop that can be activated with this kind of design. If our choices guide the user to naturally form habits to use particularly powerful tools in our application over and over, the user's own experience does all the work of selling the appeal of these elements to them.

In this way, powerful minimalist design powers itself beyond the sum of its parts. Focused, smartly laid out user experience set pieces birth recurring positive experiences and associations for the people working with our products.