dipsi

ALT Understanding skeuomorphic spatial affordances as a user requires very little mental overhead, since they mimic the real world very closely. However, skeuomorphic spatial affordances are rare in most software today. Why? Because it's hard to directly analogize the real, three-dimensional world in two dimensions.

ALT Spatial interfaces can go beyond just spatial affordances, and it should be noted that spatial thinking has not been completely ignored in software. Early app design increasingly moved towards spatial concepts for navigation. Today, most apps use some spatial concepts to make it easier to understand how to get back to certain screens. One example is "stacking" screens on top of each other as the user progresses, letting them go back to previous locations easily.

ALT But even Zoom, hailed as the best product for video calls, is limited by its interfaces. For example, there are only two ways to view a meeting: Speaker View or Gallery View. When in real life are you ever looking at a grid of faces? Never. It's not natural. In real life, you look at people around a dinner table, or around a circle at a standup meeting, or at someone beside you as you go for a walk. Video conferencing software removes all of those spatial elements and therefore makes meetings more complicated.

ALT There's more room for spatial concepts to become part of our web browsing experience. One example is an idea I call "trails." It's based on the story of Hansel and Gretel walking through the forest and leaving a trail of breadcrumbs behind them, so that they could find their way back later. What if you could do this on the web? A breadcrumb in this case is a single pixel that you can place in a precise location on a webpage. Placing a breadcrumb could be as simple as Option + click. While navigating the web, you could leave breadcrumbs on different pages you find interesting over the course of a browsing session. When you're done, that sequential "trail of breadcrumbs" would be saved. You could then jump back into the trail and navigate "forward" and "backward" through the things you found interesting in that browsing session.