I recently had this perfectly reasonable request when discussing where to place a button used to access a new page on our learning environment:
Why don’t we just put the button right in the middle?
I mean, it makes sense. You want to see how to access the new thing, you want to put the button in an obvious place - if you can see it you can click it. Right?
The issue this creates is really one of perspective, that was the most obvious choice to this specific person. This would have been the correct place for this person to have the button.
It didn’t however conform to the existing UI pattern in the software that we are using, so had the potential to be confusing for others.
The expected pattern for the particular page in the system is actually to place buttons like this into a submenu. Yes, it’s hidden away, less obvious, but it’s where most users will expect it to be.
Here’s the key takeaway: one person’s intuition doesn’t equal all users’ intuition. In this instance, I was able to explain why the button should go in the submenu. But explaining this to non-designers isn’t always that simple.
Context matters. UX decisions don’t happen in isolation. The wider context here included the fact that the system was designed to accommodate these kinds of options in the dropdown menu, with code and features built to make that work seamlessly. Moving the button to the middle would have required much more work and could have introduced layout issues for other elements on the page.
Ultimately, structure, predictability, and consistency are the priorities. The challenge for designers is explaining why these things matter in a way that’s understandable to someone who isn’t aware of the broader context.