A few days back, #Instagram had become a trending topic on Twitter, thanks to the app’s latest update, in which Instagram replaced the ‘Search’ tab with their new addition of ‘Reels’ and shifted the search option from its bottom-centre position to top-right. Although people have gotten used to the new layout by now, this scenario of mild chaos was a good example of how people get accustomed to certain things and find sudden changes disturbing.
In UX Designing, Spatial Memory plays an important role in building a user-friendly User Interface. Pattern-recognition is a natural trait of the human brain and people tend to be comfortable with similar experiences. When we do an action recurrently, our brains associate the location and placement of the related objects with the action and we sub-consciously follow the same path to repeat it. It’s no wonder then, that a person using a MacBook regularly is bound to slide his cursor towards the top left of the screen to close an application, in contrast to someone who has been using Windows for a long time and is accustomed to finding the ‘close’ button at the top-right.
Spatial Memory helps UX Designers to understand the user’s perspective and define the control areas of any Application in a clear way. This also provides benchmarks for UX Designers to follow, especially in cases where the browser window size changes. For example, while switching an Application from a laptop view to a tablet view, designers can opt to scale down the interface, rather than reflowing it, which would lead to a better User Experience on the application, as it helps the user to easily relocate a particular object.
However, this also does not mean that UX Designers should religiously stick to these guidelines. Except for the frequently-used elements, Spatial Memory tends to be vague and users remember and acclimatize to changes rather easily. Also, one has to account for the overall layout and other design considerations. Masonry layout, as an example, does stand out and is being widely used by Designers. Another example is to add visualization techniques like Minimaps, Toolbars, Thumbnails or Navigation tabs to reduce scrolling (which hampers spatial recognition) and makes it easier for users to stay on a single page.
The use of Spatial Memory in UX Designing is simply to increase the efficiency of the user and making them feel familiar with the Application. This also reduces the efforts of Designers, by giving them a few raw guidelines on which they can experiment. The talent of a UX Designer, in this scenario, remains to balance the need of the end-user between ‘comfort of familiarity’ and the need to try out something ‘fresh and new’.