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20 Laws of UX Design to Keep in Mind
List of key UX design principles that designers should keep in mind.
Here is a collection of 20 principles that UX designers can benefit from. For a more detailed reading on each principle click on the underlined part.
- Aesthetic Usability Effect — Aesthetic design create a positive reaction.
- Doherty Threshold — Keep feedback within or less than 400 milliseconds to increase productivity.
- Fitts’s Law — Touch targets should be easily accessible.
- Hick’s Law — Choices should be simple and easy to understand.
- Jakob’s Law — The user expects a website to work as same as the others.
- Law of Common Region — Elements are perceived related if they share a common background or region.
- Law of Pragnanz — People tend to remember simple figures than complex shapes.
- Law of Proximity — Elements that are close to each other tend to look grouped.
- Law of Similarity — Similar elements of design has a tendency to look related, even if they are separated.
- Law of Uniform Connectedness — Visual connection helps people to see a relation between items.
- Miller’s Law — Keep contents between 5 to 9 items at a time.
- Occam’s Razor — When given options to solve a problem, go with the one that has the fewest assumptions.
- Pareto Principle — 80% of the effect comes from 20% of the causes.
- Parkinson’s Law — Any work will be prolonged or postponed until all the given time is spent.
- Peak-End Rule — People make decisions according to their emotional peak experiences.
- Postel’s Law — Empathize users' actions and embrace variable inputs.
- Serial Position Effect — People tend to remember the first and last objects of the series.
- Tesler’s Law — Any system has a complexity that cannot be simplified.
- Von Restorff Effect — Visually distinctive item is easily remembered when presented along with multiple similar items.
- Zeignarnik Effect — Adopt progress measurements in your design because users remember incomplete tasks better than completed tasks.
These ideas are explained in a book titled Laws of UX: Using Psychology to Design Better Products & Services.
