Category
Design Principles
Practical principles for clarity, hierarchy, trust and conversion — the working craft of good design.
44 principles
Krug's Self-Evidence Principle
A page should be self-evident — users shouldn't have to think to work out what it is or what to do.
Read →Progressive Disclosure
Show only what the current task needs — reveal complexity when the user asks for it.
Read →Affordances & Signifiers
An element's appearance should signal how to use it — buttons should look clickable, links like links.
Read →The Squint Test
Squint at a page until it blurs — the most visually dominant elements should be the most important ones.
Read →Above-the-Fold Clarity
What's visible before scrolling must say who you are, what you do, and what to do next — unaided.
Read →Singular CTA Principle
Every page or section should have one clear primary action — competing CTAs dilute each other.
Read →Trust Signals
Visitors need visible proof you're who you say you are, and that it's safe to deal with you.
Read →Norman: Signifiers
Signifiers are the visible cues that tell users where and how an action can be taken.
Read →Norman: Feedback Loops
Every action should produce an immediate, clear response confirming it registered.
Read →Norman: Constraints
Good design limits the wrong actions before they can happen, rather than correcting them after.
Read →Norman: Mapping
The relationship between a control and its effect should be natural and obvious.
Read →Banner Blindness
People have learned to ignore anything that looks like an ad — even when it isn't one.
Read →Change Blindness
People miss changes that happen outside their current focus of attention.
Read →Jobs to Be Done
People "hire" a product to get a job done — frame the experience around the job, not the features.
Read →Progressive Onboarding
Teach a product in context, a step at a time, rather than front-loading a tour nobody remembers.
Read →Forgiving Formats & State Preservation
When something goes wrong, never make the user re-enter what they already gave you.
Read →Whitespace & Visual Breathing Room
Space around and between elements is not wasted — it creates hierarchy, grouping, and focus.
Read →Outcomes Over Output
A feature's existence is not success — a measurable change in user behaviour is.
Read →Hypothesis-First Design
Every design decision is a testable assumption — treat it as a hypothesis until user behaviour proves it right or wrong.
Read →UX Debt
Deferred UX iteration accumulates like technical debt — first-pass decisions that were never revisited compound into a product that quietly stops working.
Read →Vanity Metrics vs Actionable Metrics
Numbers that look impressive but don't tell a meaningful story about real value are vanity — they decorate rather than persuade.
Read →Satisficing (Good Enough Is Good Enough)
Users don't look for the best option — they grab the first one that seems good enough and move on.
Read →Cognitive Cost of Clicks
What makes a click expensive isn't the click itself — it's the thinking required to decide whether to make it.
Read →Illusion of Control
People need to feel in control of their choices, even when the actual outcome is the same — perceived agency reduces anxiety and increases satisfaction.
Read →Gulfs of Execution and Evaluation
Every interaction has two potential failure points: the gulf of execution (user can't figure out how to do what they want) and the gulf of evaluation (user can't tell whether what happened was what they intended).
Read →Slips vs. Mistakes
User errors divide into two fundamentally different types: slips (right goal, wrong action — a lapse of execution) and mistakes (wrong goal — a failure of understanding). Each requires a different design response.
Read →Knowledge in the World vs. the Head
Good design externalises the knowledge users need to act — it puts it in the world, not in their heads. A product that requires memorisation is a product that requires training.
Read →MECLABS Conversion Sequence Heuristic
The probability of conversion is a function of five weighted factors: C = 4m + 3v + 2(i–f) – 2a. Motivation is the most important factor (×4), followed by value proposition clarity (×3), with incentive, friction, and anxiety each having significant but lower weight (×2).
Read →Design for Closure
Every sequence of actions must have a clearly defined end state that tells users the task is complete — open-ended sequences create anxiety and uncertainty.
Read →Information Scent
Users follow the strongest-smelling trail toward their goal — they click links whose labels and context suggest the destination will be relevant, and abandon paths that go cold.
Read →Message Match (Conversion Scent)
The language, offer, and visual tone of the source a user arrived from (ad, email, search result, social post) must be immediately echoed on the landing page — a mismatch destroys the scent trail and causes instant abandonment.
Read →Conversion Anxiety
At every point where a user is asked to commit — enter card details, hand over an email, start a free trial — a predictable anxiety spike occurs; unaddressed, it is the direct cause of the majority of checkout and sign-up abandonment.
Read →Form Field Reduction
Every unnecessary form field adds cognitive cost and reduces completion — ask only for what is needed to complete the current step, and defer everything else.
Read →Inline Validation
Errors should be flagged as users complete each field, not after the entire form is submitted — post-submit error discovery forces users to stop, hunt for problems, and often repeat work they've already done.
Read →Layout Stability (Cumulative Layout Shift)
Content that moves unexpectedly while a page loads causes misclicks, reading disruption, and loss of trust — layout must be visually stable from the moment content appears.
Read →Peak-End Rule
People remember an experience by its most intense moment (the peak) and how it ended — not by its average quality. The duration and middle of the experience are largely forgotten.
Read →Empty States
A screen or component that contains no data yet is a critical design moment — it either orients and guides the user or leaves them stranded.
Read →Hormozi Value Equation (Time & Effort Denominator)
Value is not just about what a product delivers — it is equally determined by how long the result takes and how much effort the user must expend to get it. Reducing time-to-value and effort is often a more powerful conversion lever than amplifying the promised outcome.
Read →Perceived Likelihood of Achievement
A visitor must believe the product will work specifically for someone in their situation — generic social proof and large outcome claims do not substitute for evidence that it works for people like them.
Read →Risk Reversal (Guarantees)
A guarantee transfers the risk of the transaction from buyer to seller — by making the downside of trying the product near-zero, it removes one of the most powerful reasons not to buy.
Read →Trust Architecture
Trust is not binary — it is staged. Users must have lower-level trust needs met before they will commit to higher-level ones, and demands that outpace the trust already established cause abandonment.
Read →Ability, Benevolence & Integrity (ABI Trust Model)
Perceived trustworthiness is shaped by three independent dimensions: ability (can they do what they claim?), benevolence (do they care about my outcome, not just their own?), and integrity (will they behave honestly and transparently?). A page that fails on any one dimension fails the trust test.
Read →Privacy Anxiety & Consent Design
Cookie banners, data requests, and consent flows create or destroy trust — poorly designed consent erodes confidence in the entire site before the visitor has seen anything else.
Read →Label Placement & Placeholder Misuse
Labels must remain permanently visible and clearly associated with their fields — placeholder text disappears the moment the user starts typing, forcing reliance on memory precisely when cognitive load is highest.
Read →See these principles on your own site
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