RELAYOUT

Rearrange where things sit on the page or screen so that information used together can be seen together in one glance.

Planning a family trip, you've got flight options in one browser tab, hotel prices in another, the shared calendar in a third, and a text thread with your sister's constraints on your phone. Every decision requires reassembling the whole picture from four places, and by the third reassembly you've mixed up which hotel went with which dates. Nothing is missing; everything is just in the wrong place relative to everything else.

RELAYOUT means rearranging where information sits so that things used together can be seen together in one glance. The cue: the right items all exist, but scanning between them and matching them up is what's costing you. The techniques: put items being compared adjacent to each other; align entries on a shared field (all options sorted by date); use small multiples (the same mini-layout repeated per option); or an overview with drill-down detail. Here, one page with a row per candidate itinerary, dates, flight, hotel, and cost aligned in columns, replaces the four-surface shuffle. It works when search steps, eye travel, and the load on your working memory visibly drop. The safeguard: don't imply relationships through proximity alone; things sitting together should actually belong together, or the layout misleads. Cosmetic rearrangement that moves nothing you jointly use is the failure mode.