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so recently my team has been working on an interesting project that involves creating a 3D apartment showroom. My job is to design a simple navigation for people to easily navigate between 2 rooms. The navigation is placed at the bottom left as shown below. However, my teammates and I disagree over the interaction. Should the Place A button be greyed out when the user is in place B and vice versa?

Which option (top or bottom) do you think would work best and why?

enter image description here

Devin
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  • What happens when you hit the Place B button in the first example? – moot Aug 06 '23 at 09:00
  • Consider using links and not buttons. Buttons require a little more work to make them unambiguously clear. Read this question as it is one of the most popular questions on this site for a good reason. – jazZRo Aug 07 '23 at 07:42

1 Answers1

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Answer is version 2.

Enabled state buttons denote a possible action, while disabled buttons communicate that the element is disabled, so nothing will happen. Therefore, since you're in Place B, an active button that reads Place B makes no sense, because your only option is to navigate to Place A. Hence, the button that reads Place A should be enabled.

However...

I think the confusion comes because of active states, which are usually highlighted. In that case, highlighting Place B would make sense. But there are two problems:

  1. You have an arrow, indicating an action.
  2. You're using a grayed-out button for an element that is enabled. Grayed out usually means disabled.

With this in consideration, if you remove the arrow icon and change the color of the other button, it would be possible to consider version 1. Still, I think it's not worth it, and using version 2 is enough.

Devin
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