Laws of UX with examples
Laws of UX is the collection of laws or design standards that designers take into account when improving the User Experience. The laws of UX psychologically explains what causes the users to do what they do. There are several laws of UX, here we will discuss five important laws:
Hick’s Law:
The time it takes to make a decision increases as the number of options increases. For example, too many choices might take the user a long time to choose. For example, The bottom section of Amazon homepage a big number of options.
To successfully implement Hick’s Law:
· Minimize choices when response times are critical to increase decision time.
· Break complex tasks into smaller steps in order to decrease cognitive load.
· Use progressive on-boarding to minimize cognitive load for new users.
Fitt’s Law:
The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target. This law directly affects the user experience when designing buttons, for example, larger ones, especially on mobile devices that are tactile, reaching the conclusion that with smaller buttons it is more difficult to interact. The distance between a user’s task/attention area and the task-related button should be kept as short as possible. For example, on Flipkart “Buy Now”, “Add to cart” buttons are next to product image and has bigger size than other buttons.
Jackob’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. That’s why it’s better not be over-original or over-creative. For example, most eCommerce websites have similar design: product images or videos on left side, more details and add to cart or buy option on right side.
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. The principle holds that if you are handling a group of data, all the data that we understand that correspond to the same group should be together and if we start talking about different data there should be a space (air) between them.
As Example: Univer’s logo is made up of 25 distinct icons. But because they are placed in close proximity, you recognize the whole “U” figure.
Zeigarnik Effect:
People remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks. Users are more likely to complete the task just by simply visualizing it with a progress bar or list of uncompleted task. Think about how much time we spent just looking at progress bar of a ongoing download.
Progress bar showing uncompleted profile data on Paypal website is example of Zeigarnik Effect.
Thank you for reading!
To read more on UX Laws visit: https://lawsofux.com/
