Visual hierarchy for small teams

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. Most advice about visual hierarchy assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What to keep

Every screen should have one obvious first thing to look at. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens.

How to approach it

If everything is emphasised, nothing is. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

How to tell if yours is fine

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.