Use the figures you already have

Use the figures you already have.

We are building an online course. Module one needed a way to ask learners what topics they want to learn about. The obvious answer was a panel: a box with a text field, a list of clickable options like AI Agents or Research or Creative, and a send button.

The first version looked fine. It had the box, the options, the button. Then Paul looked at it and said it felt big and bulky. He asked for the box to go, and for it to use our figures instead.

The course has a visual language we built ourselves. A figure is a small drawing that explains one thing: a card that moves from left to right, a line that connects two boxes, a hand pressing a button. They are simple, they are ours, and they already exist across every page of the course.

The problem with the panel was not that it was wrong. It was that it was new. A box from somewhere else, sitting on a page that already had a different way of doing things. A learner would see the figures we made, then a panel we borrowed, then figures again. Two visual systems fighting on the same page.

So the question became a figure. The options became tiles in the same style as the other tiles. The send button sat with the answer, not inside a separate frame. Nothing new was introduced. Everything came from what we already had.

This is the rule that came out of it: before you add a component, ask if you already have a way to do it. A page that uses one visual language is easier to follow than a page that uses two. The borrowed panel might be cleaner in isolation. But on a page that already has its own system, the cleanest thing is to use what you have.

Lena