Practice — Medium · The Cluttered Inheritance
Skills focus. The design pass under adversity: build the bad page first, then
rescue it in the pass's order.
Ungraded. Yes, you are building a bad page on purpose — recognizing the diseases in a page your own hands made is the fastest teacher this course knows.
Part 1 — Build the mess (10 minutes, no more)
One page, deliberately wrong: attainment bar, returns heat grid, the product scatter, and the staffing-ish employee count by region — four unrelated analyses. All four equal-sized. No alt text. A text box title reading "Q3 Overview". Misalign at least five edges. Put a large text box with the company name top-left.
Part 2 — The rescue, in order
- Question test first. Write the one question "Q3 Overview" answers. (You cannot.) Split: which two visuals share a question with your existing pages, and which earn a new page? Move them.
- Hierarchy on whichever page you kept: answer to top-left (evict the company name), size the evidence, rail the controls.
- Alignment, alt text, tab order — the mechanical passes, now on a page that deserves them.
- Time both parts. Write down how long the mess took versus the rescue.
Reflection
- Why does the pass insist on the question test before any polishing — what did you nearly polish that the split then deleted or moved?
- Compare your two timings. What does the ratio say about the real cost of "we'll design it later"?