UX Laws
Fundamental principles that guide user experience design. Understanding these laws helps create products that feel intuitive and work the way users expect.
Aesthetic-Usability Effect
Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that's more usable.
Choice Overload
The tendency for people to get overwhelmed when they are presented with a large number of options.
Chunking
A process by which individual pieces of an information set are broken down and then grouped together in a meaningful whole.
Cognitive Load
The amount of mental resources needed to understand and interact with an interface.
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.
Fitts's Law
The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
Goal-Gradient Effect
The tendency to approach a goal increases with proximity to the goal.
Hick's Law
The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.
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.
Law of Common Region
Elements tend to be perceived into groups if they are sharing an area with a clearly defined boundary.
Law of Proximity
Objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together.
Law of Similarity
The human eye tends to perceive similar elements as a complete picture, shape, or group, even if those elements are separated.
Miller's Law
The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory.
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.
Tesler's Law
For any system there is a certain amount of complexity which cannot be reduced.