Every studio says it understands people. This page would rather demonstrate it. What follows is how we design — five findings from the research on how people actually read — and each section is built the way it says pages should be built. Watch for it. Underneath it all is a simple respect: the person on the other side of the glass is busy, capable, and worth designing for honestly.
Eye-tracking settled this years ago: visitors sweep a page in an F — one fast pass across the top, a shorter pass below, a skim down the left edge. Milliseconds, not minutes. Reading comes later, if the scan earns it.
So we design for the scan first. The opening words of every paragraph in this section carry its meaning — cover the right half of this column and the argument still stands. That isn't a trick. It's respect for how you actually arrived.
Nielsen, “F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content,” Nielsen Norman Group, 2006. · Pernice, NN/g follow-up eyetracking studies, 2017.Foraging is the truer metaphor for how people move through information — researchers at Xerox PARC worked it out mathematically. Visitors follow scent: cues that suggest the next patch holds what they need. Strong scent, they burrow. Weak scent, they leave — and the web made leaving free.
Every heading we write is tested against one question: does the section beneath it keep the promise it makes? Look up. This one did.
Pirolli & Card, “Information Foraging,” Psychological Review, 1999.Decision time grows with every option added — measured in 1952 and never overturned. And beyond slowing people down, abundance demotivates them: the famous jam-table study sold roughly ten times more when the table offered six jars instead of twenty-four.
Notice what this page withholds. Its body contains no links, no side doors, no competing asks. It will offer you a next step exactly once — at the end. Until then, nothing competes with the argument.
Hick, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1952. · Iyengar & Lepper, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000.Every form field, every second of loading, every hunt for the phone number quietly raises the price of acting.
We lower the price.
This is the shortest section on the site. It didn't need to be longer.
Fitts, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1954 — on the physical cost of every target we make you reach.People judge an experience by its most intense moment and its final one — the peak-end rule, documented in settings as unforgiving as medical procedures. The last thing a page does is the thing a visitor carries out the door.
Which is why every page we build ends on a gift, not a demand. Including this one — keep going.
Redelmeier & Kahneman, Pain, 1996. · Kahneman, Fredrickson, Schreiber & Redelmeier, Psychological Science, 1993.You may have heard that people hold “seven, plus or minus two” items in mind, and that menus should obey it. The 1956 paper is real; the application isn't — it describes recall from memory, not recognition of a visible list. A navigation bar is read, not remembered. We cite research where it applies and decline it where it doesn't. That restraint is the whole discipline.
Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” Psychological Review, 1956.This page front-loaded its paragraphs, kept its promises in the headings, withheld its links, stayed light, and is ending on a gift. You noticed — or you're noticing now. That noticing is the credential.