There is a recent NN/g article that covers this exact UX issue: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/proximity-consequential-options https://www.nngroup.com/article

There is a recent NN/g article that covers this exact UX issue: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/proximity-consequential-options https://www.nngroup.com/articles/proximity-consequential-opt... > One of the starting points of the modern UX discipline was the application of psychology to industrial design in the 1940s. During World War II, Alphonse Chapanis (among others) worked to understand why pilot errors caused a large number of B-17 bomber crashes during landings. He noticed that the lever that pilots used to lower the landing gear and the one that lowered the wing flaps were identical and differentiated only by placement. This similarity caused pilots to mix the two up, especially in high-stress moments such as landing a plane. Chapanis helped redesign the controls on the B-17 bomber to avoid pilot error by changing the shape of one of the two levers, so pilots could quickly tell which lever they had in hand.