16 practices for good web design

Bart Krawczyk builds the list on a single split: fast thinkers who skim and decide on emotion, and slow thinkers who read line by line before committing. His example is Brainly’s checkout, which shows a minimal, preselected plan first and hides a “see all plans” option for anyone who wants more before deciding. He credits the order, fast thinkers served first, slow thinkers given an escape hatch, with a 30 percent lift in conversion.

Several of the sixteen practices push against design instincts that feel right but test worse. Clever, novel copy loses to plain copy that says what the product is. Multiple calls to action on one screen split attention that a single CTA would have captured whole. Debating which color converts best matters less than making sure that color contrasts with everything around it, since a red CTA only “won” one A/B test because the page around it was green.

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• Forms lose conversions to friction that has nothing to do with the product: extra fields not required for the service, multi-column layouts, error messages that all appear at once after submission instead of inline as each field is filled.
• Stock photography and AI-generated images both cost trust rather than build it. The same handful of stock photos recur across too many sites to read as genuine, and AI-generated faces are increasingly recognizable as fake.
• Accessibility and inclusivity are treated as different, sequential achievements rather than one checkbox: accessibility covers font/contrast adjustment, WCAG compliance, screen reader support, and one-handed or mouse-free use; inclusivity covers who appears in photos, which demographic options a form allows, and whether users can state their own pronouns.
• Design decisions that already have a settled convention, like Airbnb’s calendar picker, are treated as not worth innovating on. Novelty there costs users familiarity without buying anything back.
• The “clarity audit” he runs on every page is four fixed questions: what is this site about, what can I do here, why should I do it, is it what I’m looking for. He treats the page as passing if it answers all four within a couple of seconds.