LAB ENTRY / EX—002
Soft Sort
A tactile tagging interface where confidence is expressed through distance rather than checkboxes.
Interface Concept
Apr 2026
The question
Can ambiguous items be sorted without pretending they belong in exactly one place?
The hypothesis
A continuous gesture can preserve ambiguity that binary categories erase.
What I built
A touch-first board where cards are pulled toward several labels with different strengths.
What happened
The interaction feels natural with a dozen cards and exhausting with a hundred.
What worked
People understood relative belonging without instructions.
What failed
Precision became tedious and keyboard parity required a different mental model.
What surprised me
Participants used the center as a deliberate holding space rather than indecision.
What I learned
Expressive input is not automatically efficient input.
What happens next
Paused until there is a narrow context where the number of items stays small.