Across all creative fields, what isn’t there is just as important as what is there. In fashion, Coco Chanel advised, “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.” In music, Miles Davis famously quipped, “It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.” In design, Jan Tschichold noted that “white space is to be

I always think of a homepage as the cover of a book that also happens to include the table of contents. Its job is to set the tone for what is inside and help people make decisions about what they’d like to do next. Whatever people decide to do next is where they’ll actually be spending the majority of their time. That’s why it’s far more important

Going through a thorough requirements-gathering process allows us to unearth the underwater stones, roadblocks, or potential time sucks. Had we not spent as much time talking to the History Channel upfront, we probably would have ended up wasting a lot of time on a design direction that would have gotten rejected right away. All projects come with

Similar to how a building can’t be erected without a strong foundation, a digital product cannot be designed without a strong information architecture. And since we are now all living in the information age and spend more time on screens than we do sleeping, it’s vital that the foundations of the digital places we call home are just as solid as our

This makes a huge difference. Having extra space in the project timeline to really go the extra mile on polishing the visual details will not only wow the client, but it will also impress the end-users, which is who we are really doing it for. Just make sure you buy yourself enough time to be able to do that.

There is not a single scenario in which it’s worth dealing with a bad client. Let me say that again. There is not a single scenario in which it’s worth dealing with a bad client. You’re better off eating ramen noodles for a month than dealing with a client who demands you start designing before you understand the problem, wants you to work out of

If we don’t assume worst-case scenarios when thinking about the user’s journey, we run the risk of accidentally ending up with an idealized narrative that doesn’t reflect reality, which could make us miss out on the very real opportunities to turn an OK experience into an amazing one (see Principle 41).

For pretty much everything that is built, only a small amount of pages and functionality will receive the majority of visits and user time. And though we may have a hunch about what is most important, it’s helpful to look at the actual time spent on pages to ensure we’re not basing our decisions on assumptions. But analytics alone will not tell the

And what are those conventions? Let’s break them down. Align navigation with the users’ mental models.