These are the Laws of UX applied to a digital product.
So it doesn’t matter if you’re a rooke designer or a professional product designer, these are a set of rules that every designer should know. Laws of UX is a resource of best practices created by Jon Yablonski that designers can consider when building interfaces.
So in this post, we want to name some of these laws and a few more to show you how to apply them in practice.
“Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable.”
In simple words, the first impression always matters. The visual appeal of your digital product makes a huge impact on your users creating a positive response in the user's brain leading them to believe that the design works better. Users tend to be more tolerant of minor usability issues when the design of a product is visually stunning.
“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.”
Always design according to existing mental models to reduce the friction involved in learning to navigate a new design. So that way we can create superior user experiences in which the users can focus on their tasks rather than on learning new models. Since the best designs are user-centric, it helps to leverage prevailing mental models or to create designs that meet users’ expectations. 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).
“Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace (<400ms) that ensures that neither has to wait on the other.”
According to this law your interface interaction should be in a time range within the 400ms to keep your users attention and increase productivity. The idea is to hold your audience’s attention by making them feel they’re in charge of the interaction. When you have to include a long process make sure you add elements like progress bars and animations that can help by telling users there’s work going on in the background.
“The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory.”
This is called cognitive load, since people can only hold seven items in their working memory, you must aim to reduce the mental load of your users in order to help them make better decisions. So the more chunks of information you add to a UI, the more difficult it becomes to work with it. Miller’s Law was coined by cognitive psychologist George A. Miller. According to this law, our brain has limited capacity for processing information—the number of perceptual ‘chunks’ an average person can hold in working memory is 7 ± 2.
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