UX Heuristics

Question 1

What are UX Heuristics

Answer 1

A heuristic is a fast and practical way to solve problems or make decisions. In user experience (UX) design, professional evaluators use heuristic evaluation to systematically determine a design’s/product’s usability. As experts, they go through a checklist of criteria to find flaws which design teams overlooked.

Question 2

Aesthetic-Usability Effect

Answer 2

Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable.

Takeaways:

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

Question 3

Fitts’s Law

Answer 3

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

Takeaways:

1. Touch targets should be large enough for users to accurately select them.
2. Touch targets should have ample spacing between them.
3. Touch targets should be placed in areas of an interface that allow them to be easily acquired.

Origins
In 1954, psychologist Paul Fitts, examining the human motor system, showed that the time required to move to a target depends on the distance to it, yet relates inversely to its size. By his law, fast movements and small targets result in greater error rates, due to the speed-accuracy trade-off. Although multiple variants of Fitts’ law exist, all encompass this idea. Fitts’ law is widely applied in user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design. For example, this law influenced the convention of making interactive buttons large (especially on finger-operated mobile devices)—smaller buttons are more difficult (and time-consuming) to click. Likewise, the distance between a user’s task/attention area and the task-related button should be kept as short as possible.

Question 4

Goal-Gradient Effect

Answer 4

The tendency to approach a goal increases with proximity to the goal.

Takeaways:

1. The closer users are to completing a task, the faster they work towards reaching it.
2. Providing artificial progress towards a goal will help to ensure users are more likely to have the motivation to complete that task.
3. Provide a clear indication of progress in order to motivate users to complete tasks.

Origins
The goal-gradient hypothesis, originally proposed by the behaviorist Clark Hull in 1932, states that the tendency to approach a goal increases with proximity to the goal. In a classic experiment that tests this hypothesis, Hull (1934) found that rats in a straight alley ran progressively faster as they proceeded from the starting box to the food. Although the goal-gradient hypothesis has been investigated exten-sively with animals (e.g., Anderson 1933; Brown 1948; for a review, see Heilizer 1977), its implications for human behavior and decision making are understudied. Further-more, this issue has important theoretical and practical implications for intertemporal consumer behavior in reward programs (hereinafter RPs) and other types of motivational systems (e.g., Deighton 2000; Hsee, Yu, and Zhang 2003; Kivetz 2003; Lal and Bell 2003).

Question 5

Hick’s Law

Answer 5

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

Takeaways:

1. Minimize choices when response times are critical to increasing decision time.
2. Break complex tasks into smaller steps in order to decrease the cognitive load.
3. Avoid overwhelming users by highlighting recommended options.
4. Use progressive onboarding to minimize cognitive load for new users.
5. Be careful not to simplify to the point of abstraction.

Origins
Hick’s Law (or the Hick-Hyman Law) is named after a British and an American psychologist team of William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman. In 1952, this pair set out to examine the relationship between the number of stimuli present and an individual’s reaction time to any given stimulus. As you would expect, the more stimuli to choose from, the longer it takes the user to make a decision on which one to interact with. Users bombarded with choices have to take time to interpret and decide, giving them work they don’t want.

Question 6

Jakob’s Law

Answer 6

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.

Takeaways:

1. Users will transfer expectations they have built around one familiar product to another that appears similar.
2. 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.
3. When making changes, minimize discord by empowering users to continue using a familiar version for a limited time.

Origins
Jakob’s Law was coined by Jakob Nielsen, a User Advocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group which he co-founded with Dr. Donald A. Norman (former VP of research at Apple Computer). Dr. Nielsen established the ‘discount usability engineering’ movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation.

Question 7

Miller’s Law

Answer 7

The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory.

Takeaways:

1. Don’t use the “magical number seven” to justify unnecessary design limitations.
2. Organize content into smaller chunks to help users process, understand, and memorize easily.
3. Remember that short-term memory capacity will vary per individual, based on their prior knowledge and situational context.

Origins
In 1956, George Miller asserted that the span of immediate memory and absolute judgment were both limited to around 7 pieces of information. The main unit of information is the bit, the amount of data necessary to make a choice between two equally likely alternatives. Likewise, 4 bits of information is a decision between 16 binary alternatives (4 successive binary decisions). The point where confusion creates an incorrect judgment is the channel capacity. In other words, the quantity of bits which can be transmitted reliably through a channel, within a certain amount of time.

Question 8

Parkinson’s Law

Answer 8

Any task will inflate until all of the available time is spent.

Takeaway:

1. Limit the time it takes to complete a task to what users expect it’ll take.
2. A large group may contain only a few meaningful contributors to the desired outcome.
3. Features such as autofill to save the user time when providing critical information within forms. This allows for quick completion of purchases, bookings and other such functions while preventing task inflation.

Origins
Articulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson as part of the first sentence of a humorous essay published in The Economist in 1955 and since republished online, it was reprinted with other essays in the book Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress (London, John Murray, 1958). He derived the dictum from his extensive experience in the British Civil Service.