The controls hiding in plain sight

DocumentedGoogle's homepage has carried an “I'm Feeling Lucky” button beside the ordinary search button since the late 1990s. Instead of showing a results page, it takes you straight to the top-ranked page for your query. Most people never press it: typing and hitting Enter runs the normal search, and live suggestions often appear before your pointer gets anywhere near the second button.

An often-quoted 2007 estimate suggested that the skipped results pages, and the adverts on them, cost the company around $110 million a year. The button stayed anyway.

Our readingIt behaves less like a tool and more like a promise. A newcomer sees two buttons and learns, without a single sentence of marketing, that the engine is confident enough to bet on one answer. That is a lot of brand voice for two words.

DocumentedOn 1 April 2015, Reddit published a page with a single button and a sixty-second timer. Every press reset the clock to sixty. Only accounts created before the experiment began were eligible, and each could press exactly once. Pressers received a coloured flair showing how low the timer had fallen when they clicked. The countdown finally reached zero in early June 2015, after roughly a million presses.

Our readingOne click became an identity. Because you could only press once, not pressing turned into a decision too, and a whole community proudly displayed the grey badge of restraint. The button had no hidden function at all; the meaning came entirely from the rule around it.

DocumentedPlacebo buttons are real. In 2004 The New York Times reported that most of New York City's pedestrian crosswalk buttons had stopped affecting the signals once timing moved to computer control, yet many remained bolted to poles. In the United States, many elevator “door close” buttons are inactive in normal service because accessibility rules require doors to stay open long enough for people who need more time; staff and firefighters can often still use them in special modes.

Our readingA button with no effect is not useless if it gives people something to do while they wait. The web has its own cousins: progress bars that smooth over uneven loading, or a “Saved” label that lingers for a beat so you actually notice it. The honest version tells you what is happening; the dishonest version just keeps you busy.

DocumentedThe three-line “hamburger” icon is credited to designer Norm Cox, who drew it for the Xerox Star workstation around 1981 as a compact symbol for a list of menu items. It waited decades for its moment, then spread across mobile apps and responsive websites.

Research from the Nielsen Norman Group has repeatedly found that hidden navigation gets used less than visible links, which is why many sites now show their most important labels and tuck only the rest behind the icon.

Our readingThe icon hides an entire site in one corner. That is its charm and its problem: a door that looks like a vent.

DocumentedThe Konami Code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A) was created by Kazuhisa Hashimoto at Konami in the 1980s while testing Gradius, and later became famous through Contra. Web developers adopted it as an easter-egg trigger, and over the years typing the sequence on a keyboard has unlocked jokes and animations on assorted websites.

Our readingIt is a hidden control with no interface at all, only memory. You cannot discover it by looking; you have to be told by someone who already knows. That makes it social in a way no visible button can be.