Design for the next step

Interface design starts with sequence. Someone arrives with a question, gathers enough to decide, then acts. Interrupt that order with competing calls to action and no amount of polish rescues it.

Give every screen one job. Headings that explain, related things grouped together, one obvious primary action and quieter secondary ones. Each of those choices is one less thing for the reader to work out.

Spend as long on the edges as on the happy path. An empty state should say how to begin. An error should say what happened and what to do. A loading state should not look like a failure.

Hierarchy is a ranking, not a style. If everything is bold, nothing is. We cut the second and third calls to action before we restyle the first one, and we check the page with a keyboard before we check it on a large monitor.

The test is whether someone who has never seen the screen can say what it is for and what to do next. If they cannot, remove competition before adding explanation.