8 Basic UX Laws Every Designer Should Know

There are eight basic UX laws every designer should know before starting a design. These laws will help to ensure that your design meets the necessary requirements to be a successful design and have proper user engagement.

The first law is the law of Aesthetics. An aesthetically pleasing design creates a positive response in people’s brains and leads them to believe the design actually works better. People are more tolerant of minor usability issues when the design of a product or service is aesthetically pleasing. Visually pleasing design can mask usability problems and prevent issues from being discovered during usability testing./

The Doherty Threshold suggests that a response time of a computer to its users to be within 400ms to be able to keep a user’s attention. Animation is one way to visually engage people while loading or processing is happening in the background. Additionally, Progress bars help make wait times tolerable, regardless of their accuracy.

The Pareto principle states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. It is used to illustrate that things are never equal and the minority often owns the majority. Focus the majority of effort on the areas that will bring the largest benefits to the most users.

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. All processes have a core of complexity that cannot be designed away and therefore must be assumed by either the system or the user. IT is important to take care not to simplify interfaces to the point of abstraction.

Miller’s Law states that the average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory. It is important to organize content into smaller chunks to help users process, understand, and memorize easily. Remember that short-term memory capacity will vary per individual, based on their prior knowledge and situational context.

Hick’s Law is the time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices. Minimize choices when response times are critical to increase decision time. Break complex tasks into smaller steps in order to decrease cognitive load. Avoid overwhelming users by highlighting recommended options.

Fitt’s Law is the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target. Touch targets should be large enough for users to accurately select them. Touch targets should have ample spacing between them. Touch targets should be placed in areas of an interface that allow them to be easily acquired.

Finally, Jakob’s Law indicates that 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. Users will transfer expectations they have built around one familiar product to another that appears similar. By leveraging existing mental models, we can create superior user experiences in which the users can focus on their tasks rather than on learning new models. When making changes, minimize discord by empowering users to continue using a familiar version for a limited time.