Interface Design Starts With the Easiest Thing a Visitor Can Do

Five people searched my site for "interface design" in the last sixty days and found nothing.

So here is the post they were looking for. It is not about colors or fonts. It is about one rule I build everything around.

Design around the easiest thing your visitor can do. Not the easiest thing for you to store.

Most forms are built for the database

Look at almost any small business contact form. Name. Email. Phone. Company. Budget. How did you hear about us. Message.

That form was not designed for the person filling it out. It was designed for the spreadsheet on the other end. Every field is there because somebody inside the business wanted that column filled.

The visitor pays for every one of those fields. Each one is another reason to close the tab.

Three places I applied it on my own site

I did not just preach this. I built it into realryannichols.com.

Pick your path. The home page asks "What brings you here?" before it throws the whole site at you. A new visitor and somebody who has read me for a year should not have to dig through the same pile.

Whichever you prefer. The subscribe box at the bottom of every page offers updates by email or by text and says, in plain words, fill in whichever you prefer. Some people live in their inbox. Some people never open it. I would rather get one of the two than lose the person over the one they did not want to give.

Tap the mic and just talk. There is a Talk to Ryan button on the site. Tap the mic and talk. A lot of the people who want to reach me are not going to type three paragraphs on a phone. They will talk for a minute, though.

The standards people agree with me

This is not just my opinion. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 added a success criterion called Redundant Entry. The idea is simple: do not make people type the same information twice in the same process.

The same version added Target Size (Minimum), which sets a minimum size for things people tap, and Accessible Authentication (Minimum), which pushes back on logins that make people solve puzzles or remember things.

Read those three together and they say the same thing I am saying. The burden belongs on the builder, not the visitor.

How to check your own site in ten minutes

1. Open your contact form on your phone. Count the fields. For each one, ask who it serves. If the answer is "us," cut it or make it optional.
2. Ask whether a person can reach you the way they already talk. Text. A call. A short voice note. If the only door is a long form, you have one door.
3. Look at your home page as a stranger. Does it ask what they came for, or does it hand them everything at once?
4. Fill out your own form start to finish. If it asks you for something you already typed, that is a Redundant Entry problem.
5. Tap every button with your thumb, not a mouse. If you miss, your visitors miss too.

None of this needs new software. It needs somebody willing to be the customer for ten minutes.

Why this matters more on a site you own

On a rented platform, you do not get to design the interface. The platform decides what the button says, what the form asks for, and where the visitor goes next.

On a site you own, every one of those choices is yours. That is the whole point of owning it. If you own the platform and still build forms for your spreadsheet, you gave away the advantage you paid for.