When people call an interface "clean" or "intuitive", they're rarely describing how it looks. They're describing how little it made them think. Strong design is mostly invisible: the right thing is where you expect it, it responds the moment you touch it, and it never makes you wonder what just happened.

Dieter Rams put it in one line in his ten principles of good design: good design is as little design as possible. Here's how I turn that into decisions when I build a product.

1. Clarity beats cleverness

Every screen should answer three questions within a second: where am I, what can I do here, and what's the most important thing?

The most useful tool for that is visual hierarchy: size, weight, colour and spacing working together so the eye lands in the right order. Refactoring UI has the best practical advice I know here. A favourite is to de-emphasise secondary content instead of shouting louder with the primary content. Grey out the metadata and let the headline breathe.

Clever, novel layouts have a cost. Jakob's Law reminds us that users spend most of their time on other sites, so they arrive expecting yours to work the same way. Be original in your brand, conventional in your interactions.

2. Fewer choices, faster decisions

Hick's Law says the time to make a decision grows with the number and complexity of the choices. In practice that means:

• One primary action per screen. Make it visually obvious; everything else is secondary.
• Progressive disclosure: show the common options and hide the advanced ones one click away.
• Smart defaults: the best choice is often one the user never has to make.

On my own portfolio, every section ends with a single green call to action. That's not minimalism for its own sake; it's a decision I've made so the visitor doesn't have to.

3. Make targets easy to hit

Fitts's Law is the physics of interfaces: the time to reach a target depends on its distance and size. Small, far-away buttons are slow and error-prone, especially on phones.

WCAG now puts a floor on this: target size should be at least 24×24 CSS pixels, or have enough spacing around it. I learned this one the honest way: a Lighthouse audit flagged the tiny dots on my own projects carousel. The fix was to keep the 6px dot visually but give the button a 24px hit area. The design looks identical, and it's far easier to use.

4. Speed is a design feature

No visual polish survives a slow interface. The Nielsen Norman Group's classic response-time limits still hold:

• 0.1 seconds feels instantaneous.
• 1 second keeps the user's flow of thought uninterrupted.
• 10 seconds is about the limit of attention before people switch tasks.

The Doherty Threshold puts the productivity sweet spot at under 400ms for system responses. Google's Interaction to Next Paint metric now measures exactly this on the web.

Speed is a design decision as much as an engineering one: compressed images (a 2MB screenshot can become 50KB with no visible loss), content rendered on the server instead of behind a spinner, and optimistic updates that show the result before the server confirms it. The like button on this page does exactly that.

5. Every action deserves feedback

The first of Nielsen's ten usability heuristics is visibility of system status: the interface should always tell people what's going on.

That means designing the states nobody puts in the mockup:

• Loading: skeletons that match the final layout, not a generic spinner.
• Empty: an empty list is a chance to explain what goes here and how to start.
• Error: say what went wrong in plain language and what to do next. "Something went wrong" is not a message; it's a shrug.
• Success: a quick confirmation, then get out of the way.

These states are where software starts to feel considered. I'd argue they're the actual product.

6. Accessibility is a quality bar, not a checklist

Accessible design is simply design that works for more people in more situations: bright sunlight, a cracked screen, a broken arm, a screen reader.

The basics carry most of the weight:

• Contrast: body text needs at least a 4.5:1 contrast ratio. Brand colours often fail this. My lime green is gorgeous on black and unreadable as text on white, which is why on light backgrounds you'll see it as a highlighter behind text rather than the text itself.
• Labels: every icon-only button needs an accessible name.
• Motion: respect prefers-reduced-motion and tone animations down for people who ask for it.
• Keyboard: everything clickable should be reachable and visibly focused with a keyboard.

7. Consistency through a system

Strong products feel coherent because they're built from a small set of reusable decisions: a type scale, a spacing scale, a colour palette, a handful of components. Look at how Material Design and Apple's Human Interface Guidelines are organised: foundations first, components second.

You don't need a 200-page design system. You need one source of truth for the decisions you'd otherwise make a dozen slightly different ways. On this site, the technology icons on the home page, the About page and every project page all come from a single list, so they can never drift apart.

The test I use

Before I call a screen finished, I ask one question: if someone used this for the first time, in a hurry, on their phone, would they get it right without thinking?

If yes, the design is strong. If not, it's usually because I added something, and the fix is to take something away.

If you'd like a product that feels this way, have a look at my work or let's talk. And if you're building AI features, my posts on AI orchestration cover the engineering side of making them feel effortless too.