Design is how it works

This is probably the most quoted sentence in design, and it is still routinely ignored. Most website briefs are written entirely about appearance: colours, mood, references. Almost nobody briefs the mechanism, which is the part that decides whether the site earns its keep.

Our own homepage says a website should have a job to do. That is this quote, restated. A restaurant site's job is that a hungry person finds the menu and the location in seconds. A booking site's job is that booking takes fewer taps than phoning would.

So we start every project by writing the job down, in one sentence, before any design happens. Every layout decision afterwards gets tested against that sentence. It settles arguments faster than taste ever could.

The site still has to be beautiful. Beauty earns the first ten seconds. The mechanism earns everything after that.