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Laws of UX
The following laws are the support for design conversations during the design and prototyping phase and beyond. It is not only for the designers but the experts and stakeholders to understand design decisions.
Aesthetic Usability Effect
Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable.
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.
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.
Law of Prägnanz
People will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images as the simplest form possible, because it is the interpretation that requires the least cognitive effort of us.
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, even if those elements are separated.
Law of Uniform Connectedness
Elements that are visually connected are perceived as more related than elements with no connection.
Miller’s Law
The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory.
Occam’s Razor
Among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.
Pareto Principle
The Pareto principle states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
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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.
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Serial Position Effect
Users have a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a series.
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.
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.
Zeigarnik Effect
People remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.