naturalmohican
By Phillip David Penny
Why do I keep opening my inbox when I just want to share a reel? A look at visual proximity and the cost of ambiguous icons.
390 words (Approximately a 2 minute read)
It happens almost every day. I’m scrolling through my feed, I see something funny, and my thumb goes to share it with a friend.
Click.
Suddenly, the reel is gone. My feed is gone. I’m staring at my DM inbox.
I didn’t want to check my messages. I wanted to share a post. But because I hadn’t scrolled quite far enough, I fell into the Double-Arrow Trap.
It gets worse.
I return to my feed in an effort to find the content I wanted to share and-not-click-the-wrong-icon-this-time, but Instagram has updated my feed in order to keep me “fully engaged”. The content I wanted to share is gone.
This isn’t just clumsy thumbs; it’s a specific convergence of three design decisions that create a perfect storm for error.
The “Direct Message” icon (bottom centre of the screen) and the “Share Post” icon (bottom centre of a post) are identical. They are both paper airplanes/arrows pointing in the same direction.
In isolation, this makes sense. “Sending” a message and “Sending” a post are conceptually similar. But on a screen, they are distinct actions with distinct consequences.
The real issue arises when you scroll. The sticky footer stays at the bottom of the screen. As the bottom of a post scrolls up behind it, there is a moment where the “Share” icon sits directly behind the “DM” icon.
If you are casually scrolling—not paying forensic attention—these two identical hit-targets merge.
Fitts’s Law states that the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target. Here, we have two small targets. They are visually similar. And during the scroll, they become adjacent.
The penalty for missing the “Share” button should be nothing (a miss). But here, the penalty is a context switch. You are ripped out of your consumption flow and dropped into a communication flow.
How do we solve this?
Differentiate the Icons: Change the “Message” icon, perhaps to an envelope. Or anything else. Let the Paper Plane be exclusively for Sharing. Or the other way around. Just make them different.
Great design is often invisible. Bad design is when you try to send a reel and end up reading an unreplied text from three days ago.