# Put the Button Where the Finger Already Is Two old laws gang up on every interface. The Gestalt law of proximity says things placed near each other get read as related: a button beside a card belongs to the card, a button in a distant toolbar belongs to nobody. Fitts's law prices the trip: the farther and smaller the target, the longer the reach. Put them together and you get the rule I keep relearning: the control belongs next to its consequence. The trigger should live where the change is going to happen, not in a menu three territories away. Phones made the rule physical. A thumb sweeps a small arc across the glass, and good mobile design lets options bloom along that arc, right around the content being acted on. It is the entire reason [[Technical Specification (Android v1)|Vibe Reader's capture]] lives on the lock screen: the impulse to save a passage fires mid-page, in the hand, and a control four taps away is where that impulse goes to die. The button had to sit inside the moment. Webapps get no exemption, though they act like they do. Row actions belong on the row. The edit affordance belongs on the text it edits. A toolbar that follows the selection beats a ribbon parked at the top of the viewport, because a cursor pays the same tax a thumb does, just in longer centimeters. Every gap between intent and control is a small toll, and tolls compound into the vague feeling that an app is fighting you. **Takeaways:** * **Near means related.** Proximity is not decoration, it is semantics. Users read distance as ownership. * **Distance is a price.** Fitts's law is a billing system. Audit the trips your users pay for most often. * **Follow the finger.** Map where thumbs and cursors already travel, then let the controls grow there. Done right, the interface feels less designed and more inevitable.