DEVOURED
Has Your Product Outgrown its Floor Plan?
Products often suffer when feature growth exceeds their original navigational architecture, leading to 'spatial incoherence' rather than simple visual clutter.
What: Author Yesenia Perez-Cruz notes that poor planning in navigation—such as Shopify's deprecated Polaris Sheet—often stems from overlays misrepresenting the scope of user actions.
Why it matters: Scaling a product requires careful consideration of information architecture; failing to rethink the 'floor plan' as new features are added leads to fractured user experiences that become difficult to map mentally.
Decoder
- Spatial incoherence: A design state where a product's navigation and layout no longer align with its functional breadth, making features feel buried or improperly scoped.
Original article
Visual inconsistency gets the attention, but spatial incoherence is often worse, as products expand past the simple floor plan they launched with. Slack's pile of added features and Substack's inconsistent reader and publisher navigation show the problem, while YouTube's clearly scoped menus make shifts easy to map. Overlays that misrepresented an action's scope were one reason Shopify deprecated its Polaris Sheet component, forcing a rethink of the admin's floor plan.
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