22 Basic UX Laws That Every Designer Should Know
22 Basic UX Laws That Every Designer Should Know
by Nick Babich
Design is a broad discipline with a lot of different areas. There are many types of designers, each with their area of
specialization: graphic design, motion design, and interaction design, to name a few. But no matter what you do in the
design field, there is a set of rules that every designer should know: the foundational rules of Human-Computer
Interaction (HCI) that define how people perceive and interact with digital products. These are principles that can be
applied at both the macro and micro levels of product design.
There is an excellent resource called Laws of UX created by product designer Jon Yablonski that covers many important
UX rules and creates a solid foundation for UX designers. In this article, I want to extend the list created by Jon with a
few more laws that I think are essential for designers, and show how to apply them in practice.
"Form and function should always work together to deliver excellent user experience."
2. False-Consensus Effect
The False-Consensus Effect is a tendency to assume that others share your beliefs and will behave similarly in a given
context. Many professionals suffer from the false-consensus effect, including designers.
Designers often assume that the people who will use their products are like them. As a result, designers project their
behaviors and reactions onto users. But thinking that you are your user is a fallacy: you are not the user. The people who
will use your product most probably have different backgrounds, different mental models, and different goals than you.
Key takeaways for designers:
• Testing with real users is an essential part of the design process. Only by testing your product will you will see how
people interact with your design and what problems they face. During usability testing sessions, it’s vital to pay close
attention to what test participants do and how this relates to what they say.
3. Pareto Principle
For many events, roughly 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes.
The principle is named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who noted the 80/20 connection in his work, Cours
d'économie politique. In this, Pareto showed that approximately 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 percent
of the population.
In product design, the Pareto Principle can be applied to optimization efforts. Within any given system, only a few main
variables affect the outcomes, while most other factors will return little to no impact. For example, Microsoft noted that
by fixing the top 20 percent of their most-reported bugs, 80 percent of the related errors and crashes in a given system
would be eliminated.
4. Doherty Threshold
Productivity increases when a computer and its users interact at a pace that ensures that neither has to wait on the
other.
Response time is the delay between the user’s request and the computer’s response. If the response time is too long,
the user tends to lose patience. Experts at IBM measured the ideal response time that keeps users engaged. In 1982,
Walter J. Doherty and Ahrvind J. Thadani published a research paper that set the requirement for computer response
time to be no longer than 400 milliseconds.
"The requirement for computer response time should be no longer than 400 milliseconds."
5. Fitt’s Law
Ease interactions through the careful sizing and positioning of interactive elements.
Fitt’s Law states that the time required to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target. The
longer the distance and the smaller the target’s size, the longer it takes to acquire the target.
6. Hick’s Law
The time it takes for a person to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices. Minimize choices
to drive decision-making.
In 1952, psychologists William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman set out to examine the relationship between the number of
stimuli present and an individual’s reaction time to any given stimulus. They found that the more stimuli there are to
choose from, the longer it takes the user to decide which to interact with. Increasing the number of choices increases
the decision time logarithmically.
Many designers think that they’re improving user experience by offering lots of choices, but in reality, they’re
adding extra cognitive burden. The more choices a user is confronted with, the more likely it is that they will face
decision paralysis. This can be especially problematic in an ecommerce context, where users have to browse dozens of
products that have similar properties.
19. Figure-Ground
This principle refers to the human’s ability to visually separate objects on different layers of focus. The human eye can
separate objects on different plans of focus: we intuitively know which elements are placed in the foreground and with
ones are in the background.
Key takeaways for designers:
• Every time users see the modal popup, they witnessing a Figure-Ground effect. Material design classifies Z-axis of
elevation, which is used to design overlays.
Reference : https://www.shopify.com.ph/partners/blog/ux-laws