Hi Jennifer. Thanks for your thoughts. Within a given screen, yes, layouts should be pleasing to the eye. However, focusing solely on a single page’s or screen’s esthetics overlooks what makes designing for a web app different from designing a web page. In my own experience, many designers who come from the graphic and print design world (as I did) can be too focused on just the visuals, and individual screens in isolation from everything else. You can’t design what you don’t think about needing to design, examples of which I listed in the article.

When I first started at Speak Agent, I overlooked things like empty states, error states, and interaction flows. I designed screens in isolation, just focusing on typography, color, alignment, proximity, etc. My screens looked nice but they left developers with a lot of unanswered questions, and had them pulling their hair out having to hack css to make all kinds of exceptions from pretty screen to pretty screen. My point is, there’s more to app design than JUST making a screen “look nice” based on design principles.