Affordance Collapse

In 1988, Don Norman published The Design of Everyday Things and gave us the word "affordance" — the idea that objects should signal how they're meant to be used. A door handle affords pulling; a flat plate affords pushing.

What we just did to the landmarks menu is a small case of affordance alignment. The old 3×2 grid of oversized buttons with bespoke "display" icons was a leftover from a different era of the UI — when six landmark types needed to feel substantial. But once LinkedIn brought 128 symbols, the grid couldn't scale. We collapsed it into a list, and then realized the default menu should match. The icons shifted too: from decorative "display" variants to the exact same glyphs that appear on the floorplan. Now what you see in the picker is what you get on the map.

This is what Norman would call a natural mapping — the spatial and visual relationship between a control and its outcome. When the menu icon matches the floorplan icon, the user doesn't need to learn a translation layer. The affordance is the identity.