Signs it is time to revisit visual hierarchy

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. A few signals that visual hierarchy is due some attention.

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• Every screen should have one obvious first thing to look at
• Size, weight, and colour do the work that arrows and boxes cannot

Where to start

If everything is emphasised, nothing is. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

How to tell if yours is fine

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Three things worth confirming about visual hierarchy before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• If everything is emphasised, nothing is — 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.