Nearby: Finding an action where the question begins.
A small study of contextual navigation inside a personal document collection.
The question
A document library often places every command in the same toolbar, even when the useful action depends on the item being read. Nearby explores a restrained contextual action that appears beside the relevant sentence rather than in a distant control strip.
The interaction
The selected excerpt receives one action: Keep this passage. A secondary disclosure explains where it will go. The prototype does not expose a dozen formatting and sharing options at once. It keeps the action connected to the reason the person selected the text.
A detail that matters
The saved passage includes a link back to its source and a few surrounding words. A clipped sentence without context can be misleading. The confirmation therefore names the source and offers View saved passage, instead of a generic success toast that disappears before it can be read.
Try the moment
A local demonstration of the confirmation language.
The tradeoff
Contextual controls can be difficult to discover and can cover the text they act upon. I placed the action below the excerpt in the reading flow and retained a keyboard-accessible button. This sacrifices some compactness for predictability.
What remains open
The next question is whether people recognize the relationship between the excerpt and its source after returning later. The study does not claim a measured improvement; it provides a concrete interaction to investigate.