Most humans are used to spatial thinking. Even if - like mine - your desk is a huge mess, you can probably find your stuff pretty quickly because you just know where you put it. Each thing on your desk has a fixed place in space which does not change on its own. If you put something somewhere, it’ll still be there the next day, and you’ll know where you can find it.
When designing user interfaces, it’s important to keep people’s ability for spatial thinking in mind. People can easily find things based on position. If a human puts something somewhere, he’ll probably be able to find it again if the user interface doesn’t move it. If possible, the user interface should always display things where the user put them, and allow for spatial organization.
This is one of the rare occasions when I see my thoughts materialized and verbalized by someone else, just like they need to be.
Good post about what you see daily on your iPhone and why is it so.
