What to ask your agency about visual hierarchy

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on visual hierarchy, these questions are worth asking early.

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Every screen should have one obvious first thing to look at. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

If everything is emphasised, nothing is. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

The short version

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
• Size, weight, and colour do the work that arrows and boxes cannot — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.