Yablonski’s ‘Laws of UX’ and How We Use Them
This posting expresses the views and opinions of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yext and its affiliates, employees, officers, directors or representatives.
In January of 2018, Jon Yablonski released his magnum opus: a holy grail of knowledge informed by psychology heuristics made accessible to designers. In just a few short years, these laws are now considered a design standard for user-facing work in UX/UI, visual, and web design.
At Yext, the Consulting Design team takes great pride in producing work that is intuitive and well informed — as we regularly must defend our design decisions to our peers and clients. Our team interacts with all sorts of industries from healthcare to financial advisory to retail. In the work that we do, no two webpages are the same! We are constantly finding ways to make unique information intuitive and native to users while also meeting our clients’ expectations. It is a careful balance, and recently our team has taken a closer look at Yablonski’s set of principles. We have adopted the most relevant to act as a primary metric to measure our designs. With it we’ve expanded our pool of knowledge and improved our ability to critique our own work. The following are ten laws that make the biggest impact on our process — divided into three groups.
Laws of Organization
- Occam’s Razor — The best method for reducing complexity is to avoid it in the first place.
- Hick’s Law — Minimize choices when response times are critical to increase decision time.
- The Law of Figure-Ground — A type of perceptual grouping that is a vital necessity for recognizing objects through vision.
Have you ever removed an accessory from your outfit that feels arbitrary? Or reassessed how many things need to have on your bookshelf? The same principle can be applied to your design work! This set of laws reduces complexity and makes decision making more efficient. By this set of principles, a web page should contain only information that is necessary and useful — and larger tasks should be broken down into smaller, more manageable chunks. If you find yourself designing in circles trying to organize information, utilizing a figure-ground can add an extra axis to your work — allowing you to play with things like drop shadows, color overlays, and layer elevation to separate chunks of information. (Google’s Material Design does a great job of leveraging this!)
Factoring Human Bias
- Aesthetic-Usability Effect — Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable.
- Peak-End Rule — People judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak and at its end
- Jakob’s Law — Users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.
- The Rule of First Impressions — People make eleven decisions about an experience in the first seven seconds of contact.
To account for human behavior, these laws are meant to meet users at their subconscious judgement. These laws state that, not only does the design of your webpage matter, but it can make-or-break the users perception of a brand. Every single experience the user has along the way holds massive weight for your brand’s reputation. This is why it is important to develop design solutions that already feel intuitive, native and comfortable. While you may see beautiful and unique user interactions and splash pages on websites like dribbble, I bet that you haven’t encountered them too often in your day-to-day web surfing. Users prefer slow, gradual change. Without even realising it, you too have probably developed a set of standards for what a web page should look and feel like. If a user finds a site a little too unique, requiring even a small bit of active learning, you’ve already lost them. UI design is an active battle for a user’s attention, as they are subconsciously looking for any reason to move on to something better.
Limitations of the Mind
- Miller’s Law — The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory.
- Parkinson’s Law — Any task will inflate until all of the available time is spent.
- Doherty Threshold — Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace that ensures that neither has to wait on the other.
It’s a common trope that one of the primary requirements of being a designer is “to have empathy for others”. This holds some weight, supported by the fact that some design work requires emotional thinking. While we as designers must forgive users for their unconscious biases, we must also account for their cognitive limitations as well. The human brain is still, in a lot of ways, primitive. It can only hold a limited amount of information, it defaults to emotion easily, and will find opportunities to linger if possible. This final set of laws addresses these less-than-ideal aspects of user interactions — aspects that have the potential to cause confusion, frustration and apathy. While “empathy” is thrown around in the industry a lot, in reality a designer will know if something is boring while they’re making it. If theyre’re not engaged in what they’re building or if it’s frustrating to even piece it together, it can be expected that the same feelings will be transferred to the user. The best web pages are built by designers who are not only proud of their decisions, but could see themselves using the tools they’ve built!
Did any of these laws stand out to you? Let us know! While these laws were developed with UX/UI in mind, many of them can be applied to other areas of design. From illustration to graphic design, think of these principles as an in-depth roadmap to the highway of the mind. We hope you find them as useful as they have been for us!
