Week 8 Session: The Button You Stop Seeing

What happens to a button pressed so often it stops being looked at, and what that means for designing it.

12 April 2027

By Week 6, repetition was interesting because the outcome varied. This week repetition is interesting for the opposite reason: the outcome doesn’t vary at all, and that reliability is exactly what makes the button disappear.

Press a light switch, a phone’s volume button, or the send button in a messaging app for the thousandth time and you will very likely not look at it. You’ll reach for its position, not its appearance. That’s three different things happening, not one:

Three states, one button#

• Recognising the button — knowing what it is and what it does, the first time you see it.
• Attending to it — consciously looking at it, checking its state, confirming you’re pressing the right one.
• Executing from habit — pressing it correctly without attending to it at all, guided by its position rather than its appearance.

Week 3 was about signifiers — the visual cues that tell you a shape is pressable. Habit is what happens after those cues stop being read. A signifier only has work to do for as long as someone is still looking.

One button, a thousand presses#

Choose one digital button you press often enough that you no longer consciously look at it before pressing. Over a defined period — a day, or a fixed number of uses — log every press: the time, and whether you looked at the screen to find it or pressed from memory.

Two redesigns#

Redesign the same button twice, without changing what it does:

1. For someone pressing it for the very first time — assume no memory of its position, and give it every signifier it needs to be found and trusted cold.
2. For someone who has pressed it hundreds of times — assume they will never consciously look at it, and design for the press, not the glance.

Submit#

Both redesigns, your press log, and one sentence naming what the two versions assume the presser already knows. If the two redesigns look almost identical, that’s a result too — say what you tried to change and why it didn’t end up mattering.