Design Principles
Laws of UX: Best Practices for Better Design
Fundamental Laws
Aesthetic-Usability Effect
Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that's more usable.
Fitts's Law
The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
Hick's Law
The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.
Jakob's Law
Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.
Cognitive Principles
Cognitive Bias
A systematic error of thinking or rationality in judgment that influence our perception of the world and our decision-making ability.
Cognitive Load
The amount of mental resources needed to understand and interact with an interface.
Mental Model
A compressed model based on what we think we know about a system and how it works.
Working Memory
A cognitive system that temporarily holds and manipulates information needed to complete tasks.
Perceptual Laws
Law of Common Region
Elements tend to be perceived into groups if they are sharing an area with a clearly defined boundary.
Law of Proximity
Objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together.
Law of Similarity
The human eye tends to perceive similar elements in a design as a complete picture, shape, or group.
Law of Uniform Connectedness
Elements that are visually connected are perceived as more related than elements with no connection.
Performance & Efficiency
Doherty Threshold
Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace (<400ms) that ensures that neither has to wait on the other.
Miller's Law
The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory.
Postel's Law
Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.
Tesler's Law
Tesler's Law, also known as The Law of Conservation of Complexity, states that for any system there is a certain amount of complexity which cannot be reduced.
User Behavior
Flow
The mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.
Goal-Gradient Effect
The tendency to approach a goal increases with proximity to the goal.
Selective Attention
The process of focusing our attention only to a subset of stimuli in an environment — usually those related to our goals.
Serial Position Effect
Users have a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a series.
Additional Principles
Chunking
A process by which individual pieces of an information set are broken down and then grouped together in a meaningful whole.
Law of Prägnanz
People will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images as the simplest form possible.
Von Restorff Effect
The Von Restorff effect predicts that when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered.
Zeigarnik Effect
People remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.
Project Management
Occam's Razor
Among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.
Paradox of the Active User
Users never read manuals but start using the software immediately.
Pareto Principle
The Pareto principle states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
Peak-End Rule
People judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak and at its end, rather than the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.