Fitt’s Law for UX Designers, Making Things Actionable and Accessible

Arun K P
Arun K P
Sep 3, 2018 · 3 min read

“It states that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the ratio between the distance to the target and the width of the target.”

— Fitt’s law

Which means that the time taken by a person to move a pointer( mouse cursor or finger) to a target, depends upon the distance and the size of the target.

So it’s easier and quicker for peoples to take actions or to acquire a target if it’s bigger and closer.

Fitt’s law was introduced by Paul Morris Fitts Jr in 1954, a psychologist at the Ohio State University, which later becomes one of the most highly successful and well studied mathematical models of human motion and also applied in User Experience and User Interface Designing.

Now let’s have a look at how we can apply this in our daily UX routine to make better experiences.

Below is a screenshot from Google blog page, I think now you have got an idea why Google has this jumbo button in their blog page.

A screenshot from Googles blog

And also look for the outer edges and corners of your screens, where users can reach quickly, because of the restriction of further movement in the corners, that’s why people seem to move mouse quickly to make an action in the corners.

So we can make use of this disability by placing the most important actions in the corners and edges of your design

Look at this beautifully 😍 crafted Intercoms website, look, how purposefully they have placed the signup action in the right-top corner of their website. Likewise, the blue stretched bar at the top that shows their new updates, Great, isn’t it?

So while designing actionable objects like buttons, menus, etc. Make sure that it’s easily accessible for the users by making it bigger and closer to their area of reach.

Likewise, in case of designing experiences for devices with a less real estate like mobile phones, keep it in mind the rule of thumbs, the majority of the phone users across the world uses their one or two fingers for interacting, especially most of the peoples uses their thumbs as their pointer, so please make sure that, any important or frequently used actions to be placed within the area of reach by your thumb.

That why most brilliant apps have their primary navigation and important actions in the bottom of their screen.

Next time look for apps like Instagram, Facebook, etc.. and try to observe and understand how they had achieved greater experiences with this simple law and, try to experiment it in your future projects and let’s see what changes it can make.

Thanks for reading this far and, leave a 👏👏👏 if you like my blog and, I would love to hear your insights and review on this. Thank you!!!

NYC Design

A publication for designers in New York and followers all around the world. Design thinking is what makes us write here on Medium to share with the designers of the world.

Arun K P

Written by

Arun K P

Product thinking, illustration and a 🌿🌲💖

NYC Design

A publication for designers in New York and followers all around the world. Design thinking is what makes us write here on Medium to share with the designers of the world.

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