Context Matters in UI Design

After two years of evading it, Covid recently caught up to me and my family.

Looking for ways to entertain myself as we isolated, I decided it was finally time to deal with those pesky storage space warnings I’d been getting from Google.

Have you been getting those messages too? “Space is running out!”

Alongside the left edge of the desktop UI in Google Photos, the status bar showed me in the red. Nearly out of space. High alert!

I’m not one to pay $1.99/mo if I can pay $0/mo, so I went to work.

Diligently, I set about clearing up a decade of images. Blurry photos. Duplicates. Thousands of screen grabs. Lots of shots taken specifically for random texts to friends and family, “Check this out!”

I’m a little embarrassed to admit how long I spent on it. But eventually, curious about whether I’d done enough, I went back to the check the little meter. That’s when I discovered it was clickable.

And that’s when I realized: 60% of my budget going toward Drive, Gmail, “and more”. NOT PHOTOS! Grrr!

A few UI lessons come of this.

  1. Context and proximity matter! When I saw the Storage meter next to PHOTOS, I assumed the storage was being used by PHOTOS. There was no meter alerting me alongside the real culprit: my gnarly INBOX.

  2. Clickable things should look clickable.

  3. Guidance matters. If the messaging had encouraged me to “See where your storage budget is being used”, I probably would have realized that deleting 15 years of Kohl's emails was probably a better route than conquering that pile of old images.

To be honest, it was pretty satisfying to get organized, so the afternoon wasn’t entirely wasted.

But, the reminders are still true.

When we confuse users, we waste one of their most precious resources: TIME! Context matters, and users make assumptions based on where things are positioned. Show some respect!

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