The knowledge behind every finding.

Nielsen Norman Group's ten heuristics — the foundational checklist for interfaces that feel usable.

The cognitive and psychological laws — Hick's, Fitts's, Jakob's — that shape how people use interfaces.

How attention, memory and mental load decide what a visitor notices, understands and remembers.

How the mind groups, organises and makes sense of what it sees on a page.

Practical principles for clarity, hierarchy, trust and conversion — the working craft of good design.

Saying what you do, who it's for and why — in plain language people can scan in seconds.

Principles specific to small screens, thumbs and the realities of touch.

Making the web usable for everyone — the WCAG standards and the human issues behind them.

The Octalysis core drives — the human motivations behind why people engage, act and come back.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are the three measures Google uses to score how fast, stable, and responsive your page feels to a real visitor.

Labels and Names

Labels and names are the text that assistive technology reads out when a user encounters a button, link, or form field — without them, screen readers and voice control tools cannot tell users what an interactive element does.

Document Structure

Document structure covers the two things every page must declare for assistive technology to work at all: a descriptive page title, and the language the page is written in. Without them, a screen reader can't tell users what the page is or pronounce its words correctly.

Page Titles

A page title is the clickable headline that represents your page in Google's results and labels the browser tab — it's the single most important piece of text search engines use to understand and display what a page is about.

Meta Descriptions

A meta description is the short summary that appears beneath your page's title in search results — it doesn't directly affect your ranking, but it's the pitch that decides whether someone clicks your result or the next one.

Heading Structure

Heading structure is the outline of your page — one H1 for the main title, H2s for the major sections, H3s for sub-points beneath them — and both screen readers and search engines rely on that outline to understand how your content is organised.

Canonical URLs

A canonical tag tells search engines which web address is the 'official' version of a page when the same content can be reached at several different URLs — so your ranking strength is consolidated on one address instead of split across duplicates.

Robots.txt and Sitemaps

robots.txt and sitemap.xml are the two files search engines look for first: one tells crawlers which parts of your site they're allowed to access, and the other hands them a map of every page worth indexing.

HTTPS and Security

HTTPS is the padlock in the address bar — it encrypts the connection between your site and your visitors. It's now the baseline browsers and search engines expect, and serving a page over plain HTTP actively marks it as 'not secure'.

Viewport and Mobile

The viewport meta tag tells a phone to render your page at the screen's real width instead of pretending to be a shrunken desktop — without it, your site loads zoomed-out and barely usable on mobile.

Structured Data

Structured data is code you add to a page that tells search engines and AI answer engines exactly what your content is about — making it significantly more likely to be cited, featured in rich results, or extracted as a direct answer.

Semantic Landmarks

Landmark regions are the structural signposts of a page — elements like <main>, <nav>, <header>, and <footer> — that let a screen reader jump straight to the part a user wants instead of reading the whole page from the top.

Site Architecture

Site architecture is how many clicks it takes to reach a page from your homepage — and shallower is better, because pages buried deep get crawled less often by search engines and found less easily by visitors.

Content Freshness

Content freshness is how recently your pages were published or updated — it's a ranking factor for searches where recency matters, like news, events, and 'best of [year]' queries, though it matters far less for evergreen content.