Time to complete a task falls as a power function of repetitions, so expert speed depends on the interface staying stable.
LAW·015
I'm designing
An Enterprise Workflow
Tools used all day by trained people, where efficiency beats first-use friendliness.
What this surface turns on
- Which tasks are performed dozens of times a day, and how short their path is.
- How much density the audience wants, and whether it should be a preference.
- What accelerators exist alongside the discoverable path.
- What a redesign costs the people who have already learned the current one.
Where these usually go wrong
- Optimising for the first session in a tool people use for years.
- Marketing-page spacing applied to a screen someone stares at all day.
- Accelerators removed during a visual redesign.
- Aggregate task time reported without segmenting by tenure.
- Work the user does outside the product, in a spreadsheet, that nobody has noticed.
Why these
Enterprise tools are used all day by people who become experts in them, which inverts the usual trade-offs: efficiency and density beat discoverability, and keyboard access stops being optional.
Why it works the way it does
The reasoning layer. Read these when a decision needs justifying, or when something is failing and you cannot say why.
Accelerators that experts use and novices ignore let one interface serve both populations.
HEUR·007
Time to hit a target depends on how far away it is and how big it is, which makes size and distance the two levers you control.
LAW·002
People prefer things to stay as they are, which is why every redesign starts with a deficit.
BIAS·005
A small share of features carries most of the use, which is a prompt to go and measure rather than an excuse to cut.
PRIN·002
Absorbed, effortless concentration occurs when challenge and skill are balanced, and interruptions destroy it.
PSY·005
The craft decisions
The visual and structural foundations that carry most of the weight on this surface.
How much information occupies a given area, which should follow the user's expertise and task rather than a house style.
FND·016
Shared edges create invisible lines that organise a layout and make it feel deliberate.
FND·003
Using size, weight, colour and space to make the structure of text visible before it is read.
FND·032
A fixed set of spacing values, so every gap in the product comes from the same vocabulary.
FND·042
Lines that separate, which should be the second choice after space rather than the first.
FND·047
Difference is what makes anything perceivable, and it is measurable for text against its background.
FND·002
Patterns to reach for
Solutions people already recognise, with the conditions under which each one earns its place.
Acting on many items at once, which is the difference between a tool and a chore for anyone working at volume.
PAT·017
A searchable list of every action, which serves novices as discovery and experts as an accelerator.
PAT·018
Narrowing a large set by attributes, which is what makes large catalogues navigable at all.
PAT·004
A chronological record of what happened, which needs grouping and filtering to stay readable.
PAT·019
Reversing the last action, which is the single highest-value safety mechanism in most products.
PAT·022
Components you will specify
Each entry covers the states, behaviour and accessibility contract you need to define.
The right tool for comparing many records across many attributes, and a large amount of behaviour to specify.
CMP·025
Blocks everything else, which is why it should be reserved for things that genuinely cannot wait.
CMP·010
Parallel views in one space, which works only when users never need to compare across them.
CMP·016
A small marker of status, category or count, which must not look like something you can press.
CMP·023
Accessibility requirements
Not a separate pass. These are the requirements this surface raises, mapped to the decisions that produce them.
Everything must be operable with a keyboard alone, which is the single most load-bearing accessibility requirement.
A11Y·002
Single-character shortcuts must be switchable off, remappable, or active only on focus.
A11Y·019
Deliberately moving focus when the interface changes, so keyboard and screen reader users are not stranded.
A11Y·004
Content must work at 400 percent zoom without horizontal scrolling, which is the same as working at 320 pixels wide.
A11Y·013
Language and content
The words do more work here than most teams budget for.
The small pieces of text that do most of the work: labels, hints, empty states, errors and confirmations.
WRT·001
Use the words, concepts and order that your users already have, not the ones your database has.
HEUR·002
Say what happened, why if you know, and what to do next, in that order and in plain language.
WRT·002
How to find out
Research methods suited to the questions this surface raises.
Watching people work in their own environment, which surfaces the context that interviews miss.
RES·012
Structured conversations about what people actually did, which is far more reliable than what they say they will do.
RES·003
Measuring what people do at scale, which tells you where problems are and never why they exist.
RES·010
Participants record their own experience over time, which captures things a single session cannot.
RES·013
Check your work
Interactive checklists, with progress saved in your browser.
Accounts, teams, permissions, billing and the surfaces every SaaS product needs and few design well.
CHK·007
A practical WCAG 2.2 AA review pass, ordered so the checks that find the most problems come first.
CHK·002
Documents you might need
Fillable templates, prefilled so they are usable rather than empty.
The stages a person moves through, with what they do, think and feel, and where the experience breaks.
TPL·004
A feature specification that covers states, edge cases and accessibility rather than only the happy path.
TPL·011
The problem, the constraints and the success measures, agreed before design starts.
TPL·010
Decisions other teams made
Worked cases, including the options that were rejected and why.
A generous, modern-looking redesign made a dashboard slower for the people who used it all day.
CASE·004
A system team built a complete component library that nobody adopted, then changed the strategy from mandate to migration path.
CASE·003
Hiding columns on small screens made the table tidy and removed the data field staff had opened it to see.
CASE·005
Designing something else?
Neighbouring territory. Each surface reuses much of the same material, arranged around the decisions that surface turns on.