Fundamental principles of effective UX design

Design That Gets Out of the Way

A photograph has one job on a page, and every other element on that page either helps it or competes with it. When we build a gallery for a client we start by removing things: borders, drop shadows, captions that repeat what the image already says. What is left is usually enough.

The principles below are the ones we come back to on every project. None of them is about taste. They are about making the work legible to someone who arrived from a search result and will decide in four seconds whether to stay.

Hierarchy Before Decoration

Every screen should have one thing that is obviously the most important, and it should be obvious before anyone reads a word. On a portfolio page that is the hero image. On a package page it is the price. Decide what that thing is, give it room, and let everything else be quieter than it.

The failure mode is a page where six elements are all shouting at the same volume. It looks busy rather than rich, and visitors resolve it the way they resolve any ambiguity online, by leaving.

If everything on the page is emphasised, nothing is. Emphasis is a budget, and most pages overspend it in the first fold.

Consistency Is a Kindness

A visitor learns your interface once. If the button that opens a gallery looks one way on the home page and another on a project page, they learn it twice, and the second lesson costs them attention they would rather spend on the photographs.

We keep one button, one card, one caption style and one set of spacing steps across a whole site. It is less interesting to build and much easier to use, and it is what makes a small studio's site feel considered rather than assembled.

Test It on a Phone, in Daylight

More than half of the traffic to every client site we have built arrives on a phone, often outdoors. Contrast that looks elegant on a calibrated monitor in a dark room can be unreadable on a bus. Check the real thing on real hardware before you decide it works.