Before you invest in visual hierarchy

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. Before you spend anything on visual hierarchy, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Every screen should have one obvious first thing to look at
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Common failure modes

Size, weight, and colour do the work that arrows and boxes cannot. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

If everything is emphasised, nothing is. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

In practice

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Three things worth confirming about visual hierarchy before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Every screen should have one obvious first thing to look at — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.