A personal overview of the laws of UX
UX Laws or the Principles of User Experience are a few guidelines designers can follow to create more user-centric and usable interfaces. There are quite a few interesting laws of UX product designer Jon Yablonski describes in his work, which outlines the maxims and principles of design theory that designers can consider while building user interfaces.
Let’s see some of the most used Laws of UX in brief.
Fitt’s Law
The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
Do you know? why the buy now, book now, shop now, add to cart, shop now, buttons are bigger than usual buttons in every app? the answer is Fitts Law.
Do you know, why the buy now button is bigger and than the rest of the buttons on the e-commerce site? It’s just because bigger things grab more attention of the user than small things and by making the buy button bigger the apps and websites can grab your attention easily.
Zeigarnik Law
People remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.
People don’t like to finish things incomplete (most of the time) as if you aren’t doing the things you have to do, your brain recalls that process until you finish it.
Jakob’s Law
Users spend most of their time on other apps. This means that users prefer your app to work the same way as all the other apps they already know.
The less mental energy users spend on learning an interface, the more they can dedicate towards achieving their objective. The logo of the brand on the left; search bar on the centre; other options like profile and category on the right. Here are some navigation bars of famous E-commerce websites in India- Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra. The information presented in the navbar and its structure is similar in all the examples.
Hick’s Law
Hick’s law states that the time it takes to make a decision increase with the number and complexity of choices present.
When users are 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. The more the number of choices, the greater the time taken to come to a decision. In other words, there is a direct correlation between choices and time.
In Uber — the ride service application, the task at hand is very simple. One needs to enter their pick up and drop location, pick a mode of transport (broken down again by cost and time) and book their ride.
This entire task is so simple because they focused on taking the user from one major task to another seamlessly without presenting them with any additional tasks to perform (I refer to the tasks here as the choices faced by the user).
- 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.
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.
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.
Miller’s Law
The number of objects an average person can hold in working memory is about seven, also known as The Magical Number Seven,Plus or Minus Two.
According to Miller, our short term memory and absolute judgement are both limited to number 7 on average. Number 7 is therefore called the Magic number. Obviously, it’s not a strict number for chunking as the range itself varies from 5 to 9.
Seven (plus or minus 2) is a way of grouping content so that it could be organized better for human comprehension.
Von Restorff Effect
The Von Restorff effect, also known as The Isolation Effect, predicts that when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered.
If you want a user to remember something make it stand out. The most common use of this law in UI design can be found when designing interactable components such as buttons and text links.
In Netflix “New Episodes” are highlighted by the red tag. It is the only differentiator in otherwise similar design patterns and in the zoom, the new meeting is in orange colour and the rest are in the same colour.
In summary, a well-thought design, based on the user experience, must fulfil part of each and every one of these norms. So, these are some of the laws I found that big apps follow, these are some basics every designer should follow.
