7 Basic UX Laws Every Designer Should Know

What should I be focusing on in my design?

This is a very challenging question for beginning designers when starting a new project, or maybe looking for ideas to improve their existing project. Here are 7 laws that will give you a leg up on the competition.

1. Law of aesthetics

A.K.A. the Aesthetic–usability effect. People tend to believe that things that look good will work better.

Image by Cyber Rabbit from Pixabay

2. Jakob’s law

Users prefer an app/product website to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

Users have expectations on how the website will work based on similar websites. By using this concept, they can focus on their tasks rather than learning new models.

Image by Simon from Pixabay

3. Fitts’s law

The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to & size of the target.

Basically, the longer the distance and the smaller the target’s size, the longer it takes.

By Foobar628 — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

4. Hick’s law

The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number + complexity of choices.

If all your content is on one page, it dilutes the topical relevance of the page.

Make it simpler.

Old screenshot of cruise.co.uk

5. Miller’s law

The average person can only keep 7 items in their memory at one point in time.

Founder of cognitive psychology George Miller called it the magic number 7. He thought that short-term memory could hold 7 (+/- 2 items) because it only had a certain number of “slots” in which items could be stored.

Reduce your menu.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

6. Tesler’s law

For any system, there is a certain amount of complexity that cannot be reduced. As a designer, your goal is to reduce the complexity as much as you can.

Use colour + font psychology to help you with the law of complexity.

Photo from Harish Jose

7. Doherty Threshold

A response time of a computer to its users is said to be within 400ms to be able to keep the user’s attention.

Your website needs to load FASTER. This makes the difference between a painful website and an addictive website.

At a 3 second system response time, it took the user 17 seconds to enter the next command. At a 0.3 second response time, it only took the user 9.4 seconds to enter the next command.

To sum up, the right way to answer the question “What should I be focusing on in my design?” is by paying attention to:

• Have a visually appealing website
• Make it familiar
• Pay attention to where you place items
• Keep it simple
• Don’t have too many options
• Minimize complexity
• Keep response time low