A door with four handles is not four times more welcoming. You stop in front of it, you look for the one that actually works, and you end up pushing at random.
A page with four buttons produces the same halt. Except that in front of a door you persist, and in front of a page you close the tab.
Four handles means zero decision
One more button does not add to the others, it subtracts from them. The attention available on a screen is a fixed quantity: splitting it four ways does not multiply it, it dilutes it. Four actions of equal weight make a page that does not know what it wants, and a visitor who feels it before reading the first line.
It is almost never the visitor who asked for the fourth button. It is an arbitration that never happened. Sales insists on the quote, communications insists on the newsletter, someone insists on the LinkedIn link, nobody settles it, and everything ships. The page becomes the minutes of the meeting.
One single filled button across the whole site
In this site’s button stylesheet there is a single filled variant: .pri, ink background, text in the colour of the page background. Everything else is an outline set on emptiness. That is not a palette, it is a rule. The filled button is the action of the page, and there is one per page.
The method page carries two, side by side. The first, filled, opens the contact. The second, outlined, points to the work. They are not competing: the second is not a second proposal, it is an exit for anyone not ready to write. A two-level hierarchy stands up. Four buttons on the same level does not.
The button that starts disabled
The contact section makes the opposite move to multiplication. It has only one button, and it arrives switched off: grey text, cursor: not-allowed, nothing happens on click. It only lights up once two areas of expertise have been picked from the pills set around the sphere.
A button that asks a question before it fires filters better than four that ask none. The message arrives with its subject already written, and the visitor has taken a first step instead of choosing a door. Its only flaw is that it asks for an effort, and that is also all it asks for.
The card is the button
On project cards, « See the project → » appears at the bottom, in iris. It is not a link. It is a <span> marked aria-hidden="true", inside an <a> that wraps the whole card. Nothing in a card is clickable, except the card.
The affordance stays for the eye and the mouse; for a screen reader it does not exist, because the link already announces itself. Two visible targets for one destination is the four-handled door at the scale of a component: the keyboard would stop twice, the speech synthesis would read twice, for the same page.
That is where focus stops being an image. On a keyboard, it visits one element at a time, in document order. Every added button is one more stop before the content. A page that cannot choose its action makes everyone who does not click with a mouse pay for that indecision.
What I take from it
A button is not justified by « just in case ». It is justified by the question it answers, at that point in the page, for someone who has just arrived. No question, no button.
The rest is in the handle. One, at the right height, on the right side: it says where to push without your having to read anything at all. Nothing moves without a reason, and neither does a button.
