Part 1
Laws of UX and examples
There are certain UX Laws which can help you to create a better user experience. Below you will find some of the most important UX Laws that you can apply to your next design project.
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Fitts’s law
The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
Fitts’s Law was established as a model for understanding human movement in the physical world before the invention of the graphic user interface, but it can also be applied to movement through a digital interface.
Origin
In 1954, psychologist Paul Fitts, examining the human motor system, showed that the time required to move to a target depends on the distance to it, yet relates inversely to its size.
About Fitts’s Law:
It is particularly important when designing buttons and other clickable on-screen elements. Fitts’s Law is a very appropriate principle to begin with because it’s fundamental to good user experiences and illustrates how neglecting this can lead to life-threatening situations.
The Key Takeaways
- The target area should be large enough for users to both discern what it is and to accurately select them.
- Buttons should have sufficient spacing between each other.
- Placing similarly used functions or features together allows them to be easily acquired.
Jakob’s law
Users spend most of their time on other sites, and they prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.
Origin
Jakob’s Law was coined by Jakob Nielsen, a User Advocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group which he co-founded with Dr. Donald A. Norman (former VP of research at Apple Computer).
About Jakob’s Law
The less mental energy users spend on learning an interface, the more they can dedicate towards achieving their objective. While designing the interface we can follow the common design patterns and conventions in strategic areas such as page structure, workflows, navigation, and placement of expected elements such as search.
The Key Takeaways
- Users expect that familiar products to another will appear similar.
- Good user experiences are made possible when the designer’s mental model is aligned with the user’s mental model.
- By leveraging existing mental models, we can create high-level user experiences in which the user can focus on their task rather than learning new models.
Hick’s Law
The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices available.
Origin
Hick’s Law was formulated by psychologists William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman in 1952 after examining the relationship between the number of stimuli present and an individual’s reaction time to any given stimulus.
About Hick’s law
When users bombarded with choices they will take time to interpret and decide. Choices seem to be good but when response time is critical keep the choices to a minimum. It will speed up the decision making.
Note: Hick’s Law can apply when designing Control display, Dropdown menus, Contact pages, Sign up forms, Button selection, and Navigation menus. Hick’s Law does not apply to complex decision making. If decisions are requiring extensive reading, researching, or extended deliberation. Hick’s Law won’t be able to predict the time to make a decision.
The Key Takeaways
- Avoid providing too many choices, it will increase the cognitive load for users.
- Break down the long or complex processes into screens with fewer options.
- Use progressive onboarding to minimize cognitive load for new users.
Miller’s Law
The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory.
Origin
Miller’s Law originates from a paper published in 1956 by cognitive psychologist George Miller title “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information”.
About Miller’s Law
The human mind can remember ~7 bits of information when completing a task that requires cognitive effort. This is critical because humans are constantly performing tasks, and trying to juggle various stimuli in the mind when doing so. One of the key concepts behind Miller’s Law is ‘chunking’, which basically means assembling various bits of information into a cohesive gestalt.
The Key Takeaways
- Don’t use the “magical number seven” to justify unnecessary design limitations.
- Organize content into smaller chunks to help users process, understand, and memorize easily.
- Remember that the short-term memory capacity will vary per individual.
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.
Origin
The origins of Tesler’s Law can be traced back to the mid-1980s at the seminal Xerox PARC. It was during this time that computer scientist Larry Tesler was helping to develop some of the foundational language that would become known as interaction design and was a key to the development of the desktop and desktop publishing.
About Tesler’s Law
Every UX designer would like to simplify processes and make them faster, but we have to take into account that there are things that cannot be simplified to be more basic. In this case, we transferred it from one place to another. The result of this transfer is that complexity finds its way into the user interface.
The Key Takeaways
- All processes have a core of complexity that cannot be designed away, and therefore must be assumed by either the system or the user.
- Ensure the burden of complexity is shared by identifying appropriate places to move inherent complexity.
