UX laws
The research findings behind everyday design decisions, stated plainly, with the original sources and what each one means for a real product. Every law follows the same workbook shape: the law in one sentence, where it comes from, what it means for an interface, examples, where it is misapplied, a checklist to run against your own screens, and related laws and patterns.
Laws
- Jakob's Law
Users spend most of their time on other sites, so they expect yours to work the way those sites already do, and every departure from that habit costs them effort.
- Hick's Law
The time it takes to choose between options grows with the number of options, roughly with the logarithm of that number rather than in step with it.
- Fitts's Law
The time it takes to point at a target grows with the distance to the target and shrinks as the target gets bigger, so near, large targets are the fastest to hit.
- Miller's Law
People can hold only a small number of meaningful chunks in short-term memory at once, about seven in Miller's 1956 estimate and closer to four in later work.
- The Doherty Threshold
People stay engaged and get more done when a computer responds in under about 400 milliseconds, so that neither the person nor the system has to wait for the other.
- Law of Proximity
Things that sit close to each other are seen as belonging together, so the spacing in a layout tells people which elements form a group before they read a single word.
- Peak-End Rule
People judge a past experience mostly by how it felt at its most intense moment and at its end, not by the sum or the average of every moment in it.
- Serial position effect
People remember the first and the last items in a sequence better than the items in the middle.