Ux Laws Flashcards
Aesthetic-Usability Effect
Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable.
Takeaways
An aesthetically pleasing design creates a positive response in people’s brains and leads them to believe the design actually works better.
People are more tolerant of minor usability issues when the design of a product or service is aesthetically pleasing.
Visually pleasing design can mask usability problems and prevent issues from being discovered during usability testing.
Choice Overload
The tendency for people to get overwhelmed when they are presented with a large number of options, often used interchangeably with the term paradox of choice.
Choice Overload is a psychology concept closely related to Hick’s Law.
Takeaways
Too many options hurts users’ decision-making ability. How they feel about the experience as a whole can be significantly impacted as a result.
When comparison is necessary, we can avoid choice overload by enabling side-by-side comparison of related items and options that require a decision (e.g. pricing tiers).
We can avoid choice overload by optimizing our designs for the decision-making process and avoid overwhelming users by prioritizing the content that’s shown to them at any given moment (e.g. featured product), providing tools for narrowing down choices up front (e.g. search and filtering).
Chunking
A process by which individual pieces of an information set are broken down and then grouped together in a meaningful whole.
Chunking is a psychology concept closely related to Miller’s Law.
Takeaways
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.
Structuring content into visually distinct groups with a clear hierarchy enables designers to align information with how people evaluate and process digital content.
Chunking can be used to help users understand underlying relationships by grouping content into distinctive modules, applying rules to separate content, and providing hierarchy.
Cognitive Bias
A systematic error of thinking or rationality in judgment that influence our perception of the world and our decision-making ability.
Takeaways
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.
Cognitive Load
The amount of mental resources needed to understand and interact with an interface.
Cognitive Load is a psychology concept closely related to Miller’s Law.
Takeaways
When the amount of information coming in exceeds the space we have available, we struggle mentally to keep up — tasks become more difficult, details are missed, and we begin to feel overwhelmed.
Intrinsic cognitive load refers to the effort required by users to carry around information relevant to their goal, absorb new information and keep track of their goals.
Extraneous cognitive load refers to the mental processing that takes up resources but doesn’t help users understand the content of an interface (e.g. distracting or unnecessary design elements).
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.
Takeaways
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.
Fitts’s Law
The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
Takeaways
Touch targets should be large enough for users to accurately select them.
Touch targets should have ample spacing between them.
Touch targets should be placed in areas of an interface that allow them to be easily acquired.
Flow
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.
Takeaways
Flow occurs when there is a balance between the difficulty of a task with the level of skill at the given task. It’s characterized by intense and focused concentration on the present, combined with a sense of total control.
A task that’s too difficult leads to heighten frustration while a task that’s too easy can lead to boredom. Finding the right balance requires matching the challenge with skill of the user.
Design for flow by providing the necessary feedback so that the user know what action has been done and what has been accomplished.
Optimize for efficiency and system responsiveness by removing any unnecessary friction, and making content and features available for discovery to avoid disengagement with the interface.
Goal-Gradient Effect
The tendency to approach a goal increases with proximity to the goal.
Takeaways
The closer users are to completing a task, the faster they work towards reaching it.
Providing artificial progress towards a goal will help to ensure users are more likely to have the motivation to complete that task.
Provide a clear indication of progress in order to motivate users to complete tasks.
Hick’s Law
The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.
Takeaways
Minimize choices when response times are critical to decrease decision time.
Break complex tasks into smaller steps in order to decrease cognitive load.
Avoid overwhelming users by highlighting recommended options.
Use progressive onboarding to minimize cognitive load for new users.
Be careful not to simplify to the point of abstraction.
Jakob’s Law
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
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.
Law of Common Region
Elements tend to be perceived into groups if they are sharing an area with a clearly defined boundary.
Takeaways
Common region 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.
Common region can also be created by defining a background behind an element or group of elements.
Law of Proximity
Objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together.
Takeaways
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.
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.
Takeaways
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.
Law of Similarity
The human eye tends to perceive similar elements as a complete picture, shape, or group, even if those elements are separated.
Takeaways
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.
Law of Uniform Connectedness
Elements that are visually connected are perceived as more related than elements with no connection.
Takeaways
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.
Mental Model
A compressed model based on what we think we know about a system and how it works.
Mental models are a psychology concept closely related to Jakob’s Law.
Takeaways
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).
Miller’s Law
The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory.
Takeaways
Don’t use the “magical number seven” to justify unnecessary design limitations.
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.
Occam’s Razor
Among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.
Takeaways
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.
Paradox of the Active User
Users never read manuals but start using the software immediately.
Takeaways
Users are often motivated to complete their immediate tasks and therefore they don’t want to spend time up front reading documentation.
This paradox exist because users will save time in the long term if they take the time to optimize the system and learn more about it.
Make guidance accessible throughout the product experience and design it to fit within the context of use so that it can help these active new users no matter what path they choose to take (e.g. tooltips with helpful information).
