10 Laws For Effective User Experince

Product Design Is Iterative Process

I started delving into the world of user experience late 2021 because I was getting furstured with the ugly designs I was producing.

The more I learned, the more I realized that Product Design is a career by itself that requires full-time dedication and effort.

Designing UX/UI is an umbrella term that includes multiple disciplines underneath it, like Interaction Design, Motion Design, Architecture, etc. I used to believe it just takes minimalistic design with cool visuals and animations in a random process as the desinger sees fit.

Nevertheless, it is a serious process where you must define your problems and goals then begin an iterative process to arrive at a design that meets expectations.

Furthermore, there are rules and laws (kinda no brainers to adopt) that must be followed to design effective user experiences.

Product designer Jon Yablonski, created the Laws of UX which is collection of best practices that designers can consider when building user interfaces. Believe me, if you consider them, your designs will be 10x better and more effective.

In this story, I would like to share my favorite 10 with you. Please, refer to the original website for the complete list of laws.

10 Laws For Effective UX

01 — Aesthetic Usability Effect

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

Explanation: research shows that users precive artful designs as more useable over ugly designs that actually has better usability.

02 — 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

Explanation: you must make your design so that you are able to provide the user with a feedback within 400 ms to keep their attention. Otherwise, the user will feel hindered by the system.

03 — Fitts’s Law

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

Explanation: make elements easily acquirable by the user by providing ample of space and adequate sizing.

04 — Goal-Gradient Effect

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

Explanation: divide a task in such a way that convey to the user that they are close to completing the task which motivates them to finish it faster.

05 — Hick’s Law

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

Explanation: avoid multiple choices or long list of items try to compound choices or separate them in some kind of flow.

06 — 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

Explanation: we should stick to the norm and whatever the user is used to like the Header > Hero > Body > Footer architecture of a website. Even though design requires creativity, you don’t actually wanna innovate too much.

07 — Miller’s Law

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

Explanation: avoid requiring the user to memorize more than 5 items as you would be overloading the user which leads to task failure and thus frustration.

08 — Postel’s Law

Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send

Explanation: websites often require users to enter data in specific format where they could simply conduct data manipulation before processing. Avoid confusing and slowing down the user.

09 — 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

Explanation: ensure the experience is most polished in its critical parts as well as it’s last to end up with a good impression taken by the user.

10 — Tesler’s Law

Tesler’s Law, also known as The Law of Conservation of Complexity, states that for any system there is a certain amount of complexity which cannot be reduced

Explanation: simply, there is a certain limit to the reduction of complexity you could offer as a designer. Perhaps you could offer a tutorial rather trying unfruitful to reduce the complexity of the design.

Conclusion

I think Laws of UX is a great resource for any aspiring or experienced designer looking to evolve their design skills with proven laws which make sense before anything else.

Personally, I would start avoid violating these laws which will result in more effective and usable designs.

Thank you for reading,

Younes

Credits: Jon Yablonski’s Laws of UX