Laws Of UX Flashcards
What is the Aesthetic-Usability Effect?
Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable.
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An aesthetically pleasing design creates a positive response in people’s brains and leads them to believe the design actually works better.
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People are more tolerant of minor usability issues when the design of a product or service is aesthetically pleasing.
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Visually pleasing design can mask usability problems and prevent issues from being discovered during usability testing.
What is Chunking in UX design?
A process by which individual pieces of an information set are broken down and then grouped together in a meaningful whole.
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1.Chunking enables users to easily scan content. It allows them to easily identify the information that aligns with their goals and process that information to achieve their goals more quickly.
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2.Structuring content into visually distinct groups with a clear hierarchy enables designers to align information with how people evaluate and process digital content.
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3.Chunking can be used to help users understand underlying relationships by grouping content into distinctive modules, applying rules to separate content, and providing hierarchy.
Define Cognitive Bias in the context of UX.
A systematic error of thinking or rationality in judgment that influences our perception of the world and our decision-making ability.
- Rather than thinking through every situation, we conserve mental energy by developing rules of thumb to make decisions which are based on past experiences. These mental shortcuts increase our efficiency by enabling us to make quick decisions without the need to thoroughly analyze a situation but can also influence our decision-making processes and judgement without our awareness.
- Understanding of our own intrinsic biases may not eliminate them completely from our decision-making but it increases the chance that we can identify them in ourselves and others and serve as a safeguard against fallacious reasoning, unintentional discrimination or costly mistakes our decisions.
- Take for example our tendency to seek out, interpret, and recall information in a way that confirms their preconceived notions and ideas. This is known as confirmation bias, and it can make having a logical discussion about a polarizing hot-button issue with someone incredibly difficult.
What does Cognitive Load refer to in user interface design?
The amount of mental resources needed to understand and interact with an interface.
Explain the Doherty Threshold.
Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace (<400ms) that ensures that neither has to wait on the other.
- Provide system feedback within 400 ms in order to keep users’ attention and increase productivity.
- Use perceived performance to improve response time and reduce the perception of waiting.
- Animation is one way to visually engage people while loading or processing is happening in the background.
- Progress bars help make wait times tolerable, regardless of their accuracy.
- Purposefully adding a delay to a process can actually increase its perceived value and instill a sense of trust, even when the process itself actually takes much less time.
What is Fitts’s Law?
The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
Describe the concept of Flow in user experience.
The mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.
What is the Goal-Gradient Effect?
The tendency to approach a goal increases with proximity to the goal.
Summarize Hick’s Law.
The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.
What does Jakob’s Law state?
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.
Explain the Law of Common Region.
Elements tend to be perceived into groups if they are sharing an area with a clearly defined boundary.
- Creates a clear structure and helps users quickly and effectively understand the relationship between elements and sections.
- Adding a border around an element or group of elements is an easy way to create common region.
- Can also be created by defining a background behind an element or group of elements.
What is the Law of Proximity?
Objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together.
- Proximity helps to establish a relationship with nearby objects.
- Elements in close proximity are perceived to share similar functionality or traits.
- Proximity helps users understand and organize information faster and more efficiently.
Define the Law of Prägnanz.
People will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images as the simplest form possible, because it is the interpretation that requires the least cognitive effort of us.
- The human eye likes to find simplicity and order in complex shapes because it prevents us from becoming overwhelmed with information.
- Research confirms that people are better able to visually process and remember simple figures than complex figures.
- The human eye simplifies complex shapes by transforming them into a single, unified shape.
What does the Law of Similarity suggest?
The human eye tends to perceive similar elements in a design as a complete picture, shape, or group, even if those elements are separated.
- Elements that are visually similar will be perceived as related.
- Color, shape, and size, orientation and movement can signal that elements belong to the same group and likely share a common meaning or functionality.
- Ensure that links and navigation systems are visually differentiated from normal text elements.
Describe the Law of Uniform Connectedness.
Elements that are visually connected are perceived as more related than elements with no connection.
- Group functions of a similar nature so they are visually connected via colors, lines, frames, or other shapes.
- Alternately, you can use a tangible connecting reference (line, arrow, etc) from one element to the next to also create a visual connection.
- Use uniform connectedness to show context or to emphasize the relationship between similar items.
What is a Mental Model in UX?
A compressed model based on what we think we know about a system and how it works.
- We form a working model in our minds around what we think we know about a system, especially about how it works, and then we apply that model to new situations where the system is similar.
- Match designs to the users’ mental models to improve their experience. This enables them to easily transfer their knowledge from one product or experience to another, without the need to first take the time to understand how the new system works
- Good user experiences are made possible when the design of a product or service is in alignment with the user’s mental model. Take for example e-commerce websites, which use consistent patterns and conventions such product cards, virtual carts and checkout flows in order to conform to users’ expectations.
- The task of shrinking the gap between our own mental models and those of the users is one of the biggest challenges we face, and to achieve this goal we use a variety of user research methods (e.g. user interviews, personas, journey maps, empathy maps).
Summarize Miller’s Law.
The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory.
- 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.
Explain Occam’s Razor.
Among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.
- The best method for reducing complexity is to avoid it in the first place.
- Analyze each element and remove as many as possible, without compromising the overall function.
- Consider completion only when no additional items can be removed.
What is the Paradox of the Active User?
Users never read manuals but start using the software immediately.
Define the Pareto Principle.
For many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
- Inputs and outputs are often not evenly distributed
- A large group may contain only a few meaningful contributors to the desired outcome
- Focus the majority of effort on the areas that will bring the largest benefits to the most users.
What does Parkinson’s Law state?
Any task will inflate until all of the available time is spent.
Explain the Peak-End Rule.
People judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak and at its end, rather than the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.
What is Postel’s Law?
Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.
- Be empathetic to, flexible about, and tolerant of any of the various actions the user could take or any input they might provide.
- Anticipate virtually anything in terms of input, access, and capability while providing a reliable and accessible interface.
- The more we can anticipate and plan for in design, the more resilient the design will be.
- Accept variable input from users, translating that input to meet your requirements, defining boundaries for input, and providing clear feedback to the user.
Define Selective Attention.
The process of focusing our attention only to a subset of stimuli in an environment — usually those related to our goals.
- People often filter out information that isn’t relevant. This happens in order to maintain focus on information that is important or relevant to the task at hand. Designers must guide users’ attention, prevent them from being overwhelmed or distracted, and help them find relevant information or action.
- Banner Blindness is an example phenomenon of selection attention where visitors to a website consciously or unconsciously ignore banner-like information. Users have learned to ignore content that resembles ads, is close to ads, or appears in locations traditionally dedicated to ads. Avoid confusion by not styling content to look like ads or placing content and ads in the same visual section
- Change blindness is another example phenomenon of selection attention that occurs when significant changes in an interface go unnoticed because due to the limitations of human attention and the lack of strong cues. Avoid this by analyzing your design for any competing changes that may happen at the same time and that may divert attention from each other.
