Good design tends to follow general principles that give designers overarching guidelines to work within. But for user experience and interface designers, there are also laws that govern the nitty-gritty. For instance, it’s helpful to know that the time it takes for a user to make a decision increases when there are more complex choices–known as Hick’s Law–or that because users spend most of their time on other websites, they want yours to work similarly to what they know–the premise of Jakob’s Law.
“I decided to build the site as a resource for those who find themselves referencing the same information time and time again, or perhaps might be aware of some of these, but not all,” Yablonski tells Co.Design in an email. “I believe that these maxims and principles are invaluable for guiding design decisions.”
The Serial Position Effect–which posits that users tend to remember the first and last item in a series–comes straight from psychology, as does Miller’s Law, which theorizes that people can hold up to seven objects in their working memory. Their prevalence in UX points to the importance of psychology in design–to truly serve the user, you have to understand how they think and behave, both consciously and subconsciously.
Tesler’s Law, for example, posits that any system has a certain amount of complexity that can’t be reduced further–and it’s represented by a hexagon drawn through with lines connecting each point. The law of proximity, which describes how objects that are close to each other tend to be grouped together, illustrates the idea quite literally. Clicking on any of the laws from Laws of UX’s home page takes you to a longer description each law’s history, along with Yablonski’s sources and a link to download his design for that law as a poster.
So far, the site has only 10 laws, but Yablonski plans to add more, including Murphy’s Law, Sturgeon’s Law, and Parkinson’s Law of Triviality. What laws do you design by? Yablonski is open to suggestions.