
Laws of UX - saketmehta
https://lawsofux.com/
======
yoz-y
After all the criticism here I took a shot of paraphrasing the website in a
page length post: [https://yozy.net/2018/01/10-laws-of-ux-
digested/](https://yozy.net/2018/01/10-laws-of-ux-digested/)

A kind of an opinionated tl;dr

~~~
ajnin
I agree with all your interpretations except for #4, I think it's the
opposite, if something is ambiguous then you need to add detail to clarify it,
and you can present a lot of information at once as long as the representation
is consistent.

Having lots of detail is not equivalent to being complex.

~~~
da_chicken
I would agree. I think the real rule #4 is "Take greater care when presenting
detailed or complex information. The presentation will often speak louder than
the information."

------
uses
"Make the most important thing stand out"

I'd be careful with this one and be sure you understand what you are doing on
a case-by-case basis. I have noticed a thing which I'm not sure there's a name
for, but I call it Emphasis Blindness.

Similar to Banner Blindness, I think users today are often trained by habit to
ignore things that stand out as some kind of obvious promotional item.

For example, you have 5 items in your navigation: Process Company News Blog
Shop, and Shop is the most important, right? So you put it in some kind of
special placement, and give it a button-like appearance with a special color
and an outline. That doesn't necessarily make it easier to see! In some cases
your users might just be looking through the "normal" navigation and not see
"Shop". They will skip right over your large colorful button because it looks
like a promotion, which they are trained to ignore.

Something to consider anyway.

~~~
amw-zero
That doesn't really apply to enterprise software. There are no ads there.

~~~
c22
It doesn't mean the training doesn't still kick in. I've missed things in
email because someone has written the most important information in bold
magenta on a line apart and my brain just scrolls right past it.

~~~
jschwartzi
I actually get annoyed enough by mixed bold and normal text that I can barely
look at an email written with it.

------
have_faith
Did anyone else enjoy it for what it was? I get the criticisms, you want the
web to be homogenised and free from any form of expression that doesn't
present every piece of information in it's most human-machine digestible form,
I get it. But it was pretty simple to use and the flair was minimal. I don't
understand the pitchforks. There's a few minor annoyances like the back button
not working as expected, but they are very minor for a site so small.

~~~
cptskippy
> I get the criticisms, you want the web to be homogenised and free from any
> form of expression that doesn't present every piece of information in it's
> most human-machine digestible form, I get it.

You don't get it, you just minimized and dismissed everyone's objections to
this site.

As a power point presentation, this site is great. As a line item on your
resume, sure.

As a resource that someone can use and reference, it's awful.

~~~
superhuzza
Right, and it's clearly not a reference website, considering it's a random
selection of a few UX guidelines.

~~~
wldcordeiro
It looks like an individual's side project to learn a few tools and make
something sort of fun and informational. Maybe it's not the immediate perfect
solution of all things but so what.

~~~
superhuzza
Agreed, I thought it was kind of cool. I work in UX, so some aspects bother me
- but it probably serves it's purpose well.

------
tomgp
Is there a law of UX related to making a user scroll thousands of pixels to
read 10 sentences?

~~~
soneca
I agree. And the laws are stated in complex sentences, so I really could use
some more explanation. To learn more I have to click, go to another page, wait
for a slow animation of the poster design and only then I could one paragraph
explaining it further. And when I go back to the home page, it takes up to the
top at the first law and I have to scroll it all over again to the point I was
before.

Awful experience.

It looks like the author is a talented graphic designer that decided to
compile the laws of UX without reading them (actually, I wouldn't know, as
there was too much friction for me to read them all)

~~~
yoz-y
At first I did not like that the 3rd law spoke about 'sites' when it could be
applied to applications as well (or any other usable thing). Then I realized
that these are most probably citations.

------
ComputerGuru
For a website all about UX, the site is almost impossible to use (at least on
mobile), both from an intuitiveness perspective and from a technical one.

I am entirely unsure what I’m supposed to click on, if what I’m seeing is an
animation or a loading progress bar, the back button gave me a blank, black
page, and everything on the site would be better if it were simply static html
without all this JavaScript garbage that serves exactly zero functional
purpose.

~~~
boomlinde
I clicked on one of the book covers and ended up with an abstract full screen
animation that ran for five seconds before I figured out it was a full screen
page header.

I'm confident that web design is the way it is mostly as a means to keep the
people that work with it employed. A simple, straight forward implementation
with a little color and layout to make it stand out would have been much
easier to navigate and digest, but making check boxes not look like check
boxes, drawing cryptic metaphorical icons, random show-off CSS animations that
serve no purpose etc. creates work opportunities.

I'm open to the idea that I belong to some sort of cynical minority, but I
know for sure that it often happens to the detriment of things like ergonomics
and usability. When I see a site like this I can't help but think that they
never considered the experience they're supposedly designing.

~~~
SerLava
>I'm confident that web design is the way it is mostly as a means to keep the
people that work with it employed.

I work with web designers and can corroborate that.

Most of the time, their product is sold, negotiated and approved before anyone
has actually used it. An unusable mess can be a "successful" project, while a
usable product can be completely kiboshed and not even paid for or used. This
pushes the emphasis towards beauty instead of functionality, often to the
latter's extreme detriment.

This gets worse when the stakeholder has some pet attribute they believe is
important, especially "cleanliness." These "clean" designs mindlessly strip
away anything that can physically be stripped away, without regard to its
importance. As long as the design _still kind of reminds_ the client of their
company, they don't see it as a problem.

~~~
andrei_says_
It doesn’t help that the designers often do not code and model the experiences
in animation software.

I am currently working on a redesign and just saw the agency’s suggestions for
animation. Seem to be highly influenced by iOS apps’ transitions and motion.
But this is a website, for browsers, to be displayed on a variety of screen
sizes, on a variety of browser versions.

And the users of my website use mostly other websites so if I create something
that behaves very differently, the training they have will be wasted and the
experience — unintuitive.

So the agency will present this to high management, in an ideal layout,
designed in animation software, moving perfectly smoothly and solving for only
one case without a clue on how to approach corner cases. If management finds
it sexy, we’ll be stuck with development and maintenance of ultra complicated
code. And the pleasure of discovering and resolving all corner cases
ourselves, on a deadline, with limited budget.

~~~
ComputerGuru
> It doesn’t help that the designers often do not code and model the
> experiences in animation software.

I don't think even that is a good enough reason. They simply don't approach
the problem the way someone using their app would. It's the developers'
problem to turn a difficult design into code, but the real problem is that
even when that is done perfectly, the UX _still_ sucks.

Every time we redesigned a major UX component of the dashboard of our
(desktop) app, we would grab a random secretary, HR person, accountant, or
anyone else we could find and borrow an hour of their time and just watch them
try to use it _without any prior preconceptions that come as a result of
designing /coding the interface yourself_.

It's been 10 years since we used that trick and I've moved on from that
company, but I still think it's the best approach I've ever come across short
of outsourcing some sort of panel testing.

~~~
sizzle
User testing is a must have for digital design, otherwise the designers you
work with are just graphic designers who pretend to know the tenets of UX
through skimming some medium articles occasionally and do a great disservice
to us folks who come from academia with degrees in HCI.

------
js8
The desktop apps of the 90s was the heyday of UX. There are many positive
things that could be said, but in the interest of brevity, I'll mention just
two.

Customizability. Users could set up their own hot keys, and even their own
tool bars.

Discoverability. Every UI widget (knob) had a tooltip, which explained its
function. When a menu item was being browsed, there was a help line on the
bottom that explained its function. Items that could be clicked were either
visually distinct (such as buttons), or highlighted when hovering over them.

~~~
oblio
> The desktop apps of the 90s was the heyday of UX __for power users __.

Regular users didn't set up their own hotkeys or their toolbars. And they
definitely didn't read the help or tool tips.

The best UX for regular users, not interested in computers, is somewhere
between websites and mobile apps.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Regular users are not interested in computers. They're interested in getting
shit done, and getting on with their lives.

Which is precisely what modern UX makes _harder_. You see, regular users
aren't "neanderthal users". They have a brain and some amount of focus, and if
they have to use an application/website more than few times, they'll figure
out and appreciate any feature that lets them do their work more efficiently.
Unfortunately, modern UX trends are all about _removing_ productivity, turning
tools into toys.

~~~
zzzcpan
This is just giving UX a bad name.

There cannot exist the best UX for regular users. There are things that are
used once or very rarely and have to be designed to rely on people's prior
experience with other things, like most websites. And there are other things
that are used often and have to be designed to be learned. Every case is
different and not simple.

As for trends, maybe you are thinking about UI trends. People do like to
follow those and confuse UIs with UX and make things harder for everyone. But
you can't really say there are UX trends.

~~~
js8
> This is just giving UX a bad name.

It's a question if UX already isn't an orwellian term for "be cheap on UI" or
"target lowest common denominator of users". I don't know, but you should ask
that question yourself.

If you're more interested in name than substance, it might be an indicator.

> There cannot exist the best UX for regular users.

Categorical claims of non-existence require extraordinary amount of evidence.

> Every case is different and not simple.

That might be the thing. UIs (and usability) in the 90s focused on
consistency. But then interactive websites ("applications") became a thing and
the consistency (for example in the looks) was thrown out the window.

So everybody has to target the lowest common denominator (aka "regular users")
now, because of the mess that this artistic explosion created. (There are
other factors, too, such as that touch screens by definition lead to worse
UIs.)

I don't entirely lament the mess (the artistic explosion is nice). But please,
don't claim that we made progress in usability.

> But you can't really say there are UX trends.

I would say UX itself is a trend. As someone already noted, it had a name
before - ergonomics. It's really similar to "data scientist", which is largely
a modern trend of how to call a statistician.

~~~
zzzcpan
I don't know how to explain this better, but there is no lowest common
denominator among users. Regular users use different things differently, some
things they use like tools, often, other things once and never again. This
usage is what influences design decisions, not the regularity of users.

------
aserafini
Ironically the site itself breaks the 3rd listed law, Jakob's law that states
"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."
because it breaks the back button. When navigating to a law and then hitting
back the site sends you to the top of the list again. -

~~~
Lxr
My vote for law 11 is “don’t use JavaScript unless it’s absolutely necessary”.
That way the browser actually behaves the way you expect.

~~~
rovek
Seems a broad law considering

* Expectation is subjective and this forum are the minority

* History-jacking done badly is not a reason to throw out a technology

Random JavaScript hate is so last year

~~~
iapx88
> Random JavaScript hate is so last year

It may well be, and with good reason. However, I still encounter people who
think that JavaScript is only used for things like onMouseOver and find it
difficult to accept that actually, their favourite app or site is entirely
powered by JavaScript.

~~~
rovek
That sounds like the vast majority of users expect more functionality from
browsers than can be achieved without javascript. Do you think they would be
willing to part with that functionality to achieve engineering perfection?

~~~
iapx88
> Do you think they would be willing to part with that functionality to
> achieve engineering perfection?

I think that the question would be entirely lost on most users. Perhaps there
needs to be a push to educate on the benefits.

------
swearwolves
As a portfolio piece, it's great. I don't really care that it's not the most
usable thing in the world - the underlying concept is sound, it's easy to see
a lot of effort went into the design and execution, and the site looks great!
Buuuut that's about all it's good for in it's current form.

Unfortunately, the way something looks is but a tiny, tiny factor in the scope
of the overall UX. This totally falls apart as a reference piece that I can
bookmark and go back to from time to time. I think this is also compounded by
the fact that the content of the site is centered around preaching good UX -
but doesn't adhere to it's own advice. I can forgive lapses in UX thinking on
software engineering blogs or the latest and greatest crypto forum...but if
your site about UX has bad UX, you're in for a bad time - especially on HN.

------
sarenrae
Welcome to this website about UX that took all of 2 seconds to annoy the shit
out of me by giving me the impression that I am in some sort of foreground
mode that I possibly might want to get out of to access the site...

------
dhimes
I don't have the references right in front of me but I'm pretty sure the 7
+/\- 2 in Law six is now thought to be 5 +/\- 2.

Wiki puts it at 4 +/\- 1:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-
term_memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-term_memory)

~~~
k_
Plus the associated illustration (on Laws of UX) seems to agree with you.

------
anthonyshort
The reaction on Hacker News compared to the reaction on Designer News is
great.

I think the problem people are struggling with is that it's a site created
mostly for fun and delight, but the message is about "UX", which people
generally think of as a way to maximize efficiency.

Products don't always need to be relentlessly efficient to be considered
useful or "good". Some products are created for you to just enjoy.

~~~
neogodless
[0] [https://www.designernews.co/stories/90954-laws-of-
ux](https://www.designernews.co/stories/90954-laws-of-ux)

Super positive. We love it.

Blows my mind. But that's the point - it's really like two very, very
different ways of thinking about, approaching/creating and evaluating projects
(in this case, a web site.) On one side, they have "an eye for design" that
really appreciates this novel UI design, but on this other side, we have that
eye for efficiency and... ahem... user experience. (Rather than how a designer
might experience something.)

~~~
zzzcpan
Oh, thanks for the link, this gives it a lot more context. A website made just
to show his designer friends who are also pressured by the market to not value
UX. Makes sense they romanticize UX and don't actually bother with it
themselves.

~~~
anthonyshort
That's not really the point we were making and I'm not sure you have a correct
understanding of UX, as you're conflating UX and visual design.

There's no pressure in the market to not value UX. Everyone wants and needs
that. If anything there are pressures to only value efficiency rather than
delight. Sometimes "fun" isn't efficient.

------
m12k
> Jacob'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.

This should come with the footnote "unless you're Facebook". I wonder if
they're fully aware of the power they wield in defining what normal/expected
UX looks like to a so many people? (e.g. popularizing the mobile three lines
'hamburger' menu, then later moving away from it themselves)

~~~
arrrg
Most people aren’t working on such a site. I think such a footnote would be
dangerous since too many people would then assume that they are, in fact,
Facebook.

I mean, even site of huge companies are not necessarily the Facebook of
anything, since that’s just not the use case. I would, for example, argue that
this law applies perfectly and without any qualifications to Apple’s website
which might see a lot of traffic, but it’s not exactly a site users spend most
of their times on. (I would also argue that the website people actually do
spend most time on exists in a certain context where the outside world will
have some influence on how and how efficiently it is perceived and used.
Obviously the website people do spend the most time on has a role in forming
that context, but so does the web as a whole and every single site.)

Oh, and I do think Facebook is very aware of that fact, but you still have to
see that they are always wrestling with the status quo, i.e. for them the law
takes the form of “Users spend most of their time on other sites _or on the
old variant of your site_. This means that users prefer your site to work the
same way as all the other sites they already know _or your site as it was_.“

It’s not exactly easy for them, even if they get to be expectation-defining
and their power is not absolute. The stakes are high.

------
acbart

        Miller's Law - The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory.
    

I actually needed to research this claim for my dissertation, and found that
some researchers believe it is more complex than as presented by Miller. The
number can fluctuate depending on what is being stored, the individual, and a
number of other factors. A worthwhile starting point is the Wikipedia Page [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two)

------
janci
Oh the irony, this site has terrible UX.

~~~
fredley

        <ul>
          {% for law in laws %}
          <li><strong>{{ law.name }}</strong>  - {{ law.summary }}
           <a href="{{ law.wikipedia_url }}">{{ law.name }} on Wikipedia</a>
          </li>
          {% endfor %}
        </ul>

~~~
audiolion
Jinja2 or Django template language?

~~~
aserafini
I think it's valid in both!

------
kleff
Tesler's law really rings true in non-UX environments too. I have worked with
several people insisting that you can somehow remove complexity by wrapping it
in more levels of abstraction, which is utterly infuriating. Sometimes you
really just have to accept that certain things are complex, and deal with it.

------
tabeth
Is there are place where you can simply download pages already "perfected" in
its UX and you can simply add your own custom business logic to it?

Something in this direction would be Bootstrap's templates:

[https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/examples/](https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/examples/)

I dunno about you, but I'd rather not have to think about how to make project
sites look like every time, but at the same time not necessarily use the same
purchased template (because said template may not actually have a good UX).

The fact that there are no standards here is part of the problem, IMO. Novelty
drives views and therefore revenue so some sites are incentivized to be overly
complex, imo.

~~~
rsoto
UX can't be a plug-and-play solution, because it depends on your business and
the user's goals.

UX is figuring out what should be a main menu element and what shouldn't. Home
and princing? Definitively. ToS and privacy policy? Not so much.

UX is making some elements stand out as they are. What's the best way to show
links to users? Spoiler alert: blue color and underline. But then what happens
when your brand color is blue and the design has a blue background? Then links
won't stand out.

You could say that the UX plug-and-play solution is the way browsers handle
the default CSS, add a few more styles and you got sites like CraigsList and
Pinboard. And brutalism web design was born.

But that's the visual part about UX, you have to figure out what your users
are feeling, and for most starting sites, feeling good is the selling point,
so you have to understand their psyche and design towards it.

------
thestephen
Here's my suggested addition, law 00, that this website really needs to
follow: Please don't make your websites into huge Vogue ads on desktop. I have
a 27" monitor, I can fit more than 4 lines of text on my screen.

------
limaoscarjuliet
The animation and no text displayed when a law is selected makes me think I'm
waiting for loading to complete. It takes me couple of seconds to realize I
need to scroll down to see the text.

------
GordonS
What font is this using? That weird mark on all the "st" pairs is
_irritating_!

Maybe we need a number 11, "don't use weird fonts"

------
uxcolumbo
Miller's law is outdated, there are newer studies that say working memory is
around 4, very rarely 6. You can check your working memory with this little
test mentioned in this tweet:

[https://mobile.twitter.com/UXColumbo/status/5978387232633651...](https://mobile.twitter.com/UXColumbo/status/597838723263365120)

------
pkamb
The "next" button is extremely difficult to find. I wonder if this site was
user-tested.

Nice, huge, Fitts' Law-optimized button though.

------
siproprio
I call bullshit on all of these, with the possible exception of Fitt's Law and
Tesler's Law.

It seems that a lot of things these days are being extremely simplified beyond
their point of usefulness and that things are always too small and too
cumbersome to click, and require extra clicks because "wow such empty-ness and
whitespace-ness".

------
JonasJSchreiber
I happen to think this is freaking awesome

------
adambmedia
I find the layout of poster downloads on the detail pages of the individual
laws, with the text of the law and lawofux.com tag on the right side,
unfortunate. The layout of the posters on the top-level page are 100x more
evocative and elegant. They are the posters I want.

------
zython
Really surprised that Gestalt Laws are not listed. (Law of Proximity is one of
them).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology)

------
jwdunne
It would be better if, instead of a useless albeit pretty icon, there was a
brief description of what the law is about.

Fitts's Law tells me nothing about what it is other than its a UX "law" coined
by someone called Fitts.

~~~
zzzcpan
Here's a good article about this law, with many examples:
[http://asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html](http://asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html)

~~~
jwdunne
Wasn't really about the law itself. The same applies to all laws listed.

I want to know which ones are most relevant to me. I'd like to see a summary
for each one so I can make that decision before loading another page.
Otherwise, I needlessly have to click on them, make a decision and click back
if not.

This is similar to how a blog typically shows an excerpt for each post on the
blog index. See Jakob's law.

------
anonymousab
One HCI book I read had a point that relates to Tesler's law: If your change
requires users to make more clicks to perform the same task or action, it is
probably a bad change.

------
laythea
Not a fan of the website UI. Eg. For me, having to have a big down arrow
telling the user further content is down, is a UI fail.

------
AtTheLast
The site looks nice, but I had to do way to much clicking to see the
information. I gave up after the thrid law.

------
foobaw
Wish there were actual examples of each one instead of just an explanation. UI
is cool but UX is poor.

------
phantarch
A new "Law of UX" should be coined: "Visual design is not UX."

------
erAck
I know it's Laws of UX, but I first read the domain name as Law of Sux.

------
nkkollaw
Very cool, but no law about not using dark grey fonts on black..?

------
lucaspottersky
i loved the fact that a site about UX doesn't allow me to open the links in
new tabs... sooo annoying! damn it!

------
bhauer
Complaints about the web site itself aside, I'd like to encourage designers to
exercise more restraint when applying some of these laws. Most poignant for me
is the misapplication and zealous over-application of Hick's Law. If you
review the detailed link provided by the site [1] you will see some commentary
about when not to use Hick's law.

Personally, I would significantly expand where Hick's law should not be
applied. Examine the example provided that compares two remote controls: one
with a common suite of buttons, and another with a dramatically reduced set of
buttons. The site seems to suggest that at the very least the stripped remote
yields ratings of "better user experience" from users. I would argue that such
_ratings_ alone should not drive UX decision-making.

In my life, I have seen the trend of simplifying user interfaces chip away at
functionality in virtually every interaction I have with technology, and I
don't feel better for it. I really miss the opportunity to more finely control
devices and applications according to my needs and wants. The most recent
technological epoch—focused so much on mobile devices as it is—has been among
the most pronounced with its stripping of functionality (ostensibly to make
things easier to use on tiny displays).

I often feel that this law is misapplied, perhaps subconsciously as an excuse
to not build more comprehensive functionality. Why build a hard button that
can turn on and off Closed Captioning when you can just put that in a menu, or
better yet, not implement Closed Captioning at all?

(To be clear: it can be perfectly fine to hide infrequently-used features in
special menus. I use about:config in Firefox routinely. What bothers me most
is that, for example, the browser on my phone doesn't have a tenth the options
of Firefox and certainly doesn't have anything like about:config. The argument
this is because it's a small screen device seems hollow to me; the real reason
almost always rings of laziness and contempt for customization by users.
Sometimes it will be spun as a means to reduce testing time—laziness by
another name—as if mobile software has had any track record of being tested
more thoroughly versus old desktop software.)

Designers, hear my plea: Let's start pushing back on Hick's Law. Yes, in cases
of needing a fast decision, a stripped user interface is agreeable. But in
many cases, we're not acutely rushed while using our devices. Generally, I
want more functionality from technology, not less. Stop using a UX law as
cover for laziness and reduced feature sets.

[1] [https://uxplanet.org/design-principles-hicks-law-quick-
decis...](https://uxplanet.org/design-principles-hicks-law-quick-decision-
making-3dcc1b1a0632)

~~~
intrasight
>doesn't have anything like about:config

I use about:config frequently on my phone - is a pain to use on a phone
however. Here's an idea. Use software on the phone but allows users (who wish
to) to do deep configuration of phone software on their desktop computer.

I have the opposite complaint about most phone apps - they expose complexity
on screens where it's not appropriate. Good software on any platform should
"make common things easy and hard things possible".

------
raister
what a load...

Conservation, momentum, trying to force people to use physics concepts for UX,
for crying out loud, is anybody taking this seriously?

~~~
daemonk
Yeah seriously. Are people really that insecure with their job titles that
they need to invent bullshit to make UX seem more scientific?

------
gkya
Gkya's law of usefulness of a web page:

The usefulness of a web page is a function of the multiplication of the number
of laws it cites w/o any context whatsoever and the ratio of the lines of text
such page contains in a screenful over how many it could've contained.

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

Wat?

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

Certainly. But this is as relevant as general relativity to designing UX: the
context is the key. What are you making, for what purpose, when, for whom? In
this form in which it's put forth here, this can mean about anything.

> 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.

This is SOOO WRONG. I probably don't spend time on those sites because I'm in
love with their UI, most of the time I'm fighting it with uBlock and patience.
Many people are in prisons, that doesn't mean they like it.

> People will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images as the
> simplest form possible, because it is the interpretation that requires the
> least cognitive effort of us.

Again, this means nothing. It's like, "stones are hard". Alright then, what am
I supposed to do? Sand them? Hit my head on them? Throw them at passers-by?

> Objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped
> together.

Alright...

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

Yeah...

> Any task will inflate until all of the available time is spent.

Oh, thanks...

> Users have a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a
> series.

This is kind of immediately useful, but it's also neat that this rule is
ignored in making this fancy bulleted list.

> 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.

Agree.

> The Von Restorff effect, also known as The Isolation Effect, predicts that
> when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the
> rest is most likely to be remembered.

Certainly true.

This web page is a good demonstration of bad UX: there certainly are some
stuff there that _could_ be useful, but no indication of how that can be
possible is made, no explanation of what is before the eyes of the reader is
there, the only means of interpretation provided to the reader is intuition,
illegiblity is swiftly achieved by using black font on a nearly-black
background, the viewport is used with absolutely no care to efficiency, and
there is a menu that requires JavaScript to operate. This is like a parody of
a page on UX laws.

Put information on your web pages, people.

~~~
wingerlang
> The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of
> the target.

If you need to move the cursor far and to a small target, it will take a long
time to hone in on it.

The shorter you have to move it, and the larger the target - the easier it is
to click.

For example the menu on macOS is always at the top of the screen, making its
target HUGE and is therefore basically O(1) to hit.

~~~
alxlaz
What (I believe) gkya was trying to point out is that "the time to acquire a
target is a function of the distance to and size of the target" is a rather
pointless statement. Of course it's _a_ function of the distance to and size
of a target; but Fitts' law consists not in this observation (which was
nothing new to Fitts himself, and most likely to the entire human race ever
since the first Paleolithic man tried to throw a stone at something), but in
the actual function, ID = log(2D/W).

The cargo-cult reading of Fitts' work which is so prevalent nowadays probably
accounts for many of the instances of cargo-cult UX design that are so popular
today.

~~~
gkya
I don't really know Fitts' work, but I do understand that what that sentence
means is obviously "smaller things are harder to click or tap". But that is
very obvious and thus meaningless without indicating what that implies: e.g.
"make bigger buttons".

~~~
alxlaz
OK, first, that sentence _does not_ mean "smaller things are harder to click
or tap". That sentence would still hold true if smaller things were _easier_
to click or tap. Besides, in 1954, when Fitts' paper appeared, it was already
understood that this was the case.

I'm not being overly pedantic here -- Archimedes' principle is not that
"whether an object sinks or floats depends on what it's made of", that had
been known since the dawn of time. Archimedes' contribution was to give it a
quantitative formulation, which is what we now call Archimedes' principle --
the force is equal to the weight of the volume of liquid that the immersed
object displaces. Similarly, Fitts' law is not that larger targets are easier
to hit, that has been understood forever; it's quantifying this statement, and
the end result is what we now know as Fitts' law.

Second, the implication "make bigger buttons" is not at all valid in every
circumstance -- which is why I warmly suggest reading the actual paper to
anyone who cites it.

Fitts' work applies to _repetitive_ movements of equal amplitude and speed,
not necessarily made with active cognitive involvement, and assumes that
targets are known in advance and -- although not explicitly stated, but
implicit in the experiment -- easily distinguishable. It will tell you nothing
useful about the size of buttons in dialog boxes, for example. (Edit:) this
blind interpretation would also suggest, for example, that making the macOS
menu thicker would help, but it doesn't; or that simply making buttons thin,
but placing them on top of the screen, would also help -- which holds is only
partially true for mouse-driven interfaces, and not at all for touch
interfaces.

~~~
gkya
I'm not really interested in these details, and "make bigger buttons" was just
an example of what an implication might have been (as indicated by "e.g.").
What I tried to criticise was the vagueness of the linked page and the
scarcity of information.

~~~
alxlaz
> What I tried to criticise was the vagueness of the linked page and the
> scarcity of information.

So if you are not interested in "these details", but you found the page vague
and the information scarce, _what details_ should it have included so as not
to be vague?

~~~
gkya
> what details should it have included so as not to be vague?

\- How is the correctness of such "law", expecially in context of UX desgin,
is observed?

\- What are practical implications of these "laws", again in the context of UX
design.

------
throwaway081203
The navigation on this site is so bad I created an account on HN just to
mention it.

~~~
megous
I wish more websites would go back to header/sidebar/content layouts and
rather than trying to impress with all the gimmicky crap and random layout,
would again start trying to inform.

------
callesgg
Don't fuck with scrolling that should be a rule.

------
dozzie
You do realize that this "UX" thing was for decades called "ergonomics" and
had a large body of research behind, do you?

~~~
radiorental
Did you mean to say 'Usability'

Ergonomics was and still is it's own thing. It very much relates to the
physical world exclusively.

~~~
dozzie
So a digital interface that is displayed on a screen of a desktop is "UX", but
the very same digital interface that is displayed on a touchscreen attached to
industrial machine is suddenly a totally different field "ergonomics"? Or does
it need physical buttons to be called that?

~~~
daleco
In your case, there would be an overlap. A digital interface is UI. UX is
multi disciplinary, it would focus more on the human centered process of
building an application that fits the user needs. Ergonomic specialists would
take into account the job (task), physical environment, user need, equipement
(does the worker wear gloves...). Some are trained to be able to work on both
fields (Human factor, cognitive engineer...)

UX could also be called cognitive ergonomics.

------
JepZ
The 3rd law is just wrong.

Yes, we spend more time on other sites and therefore, we are used to the UX
patterns used on other sites, but that doesn't mean that all other pages are
doing good.

Actually, we do not choose the sites we are on purely based on UX patterns.
Instead we choose the sites by the service/functionality they are offering.

So assuming that other pages are doing good UX and inventing new patterns will
irritate users might be a good advise for junior UX designers, but UX experts
should always question the status quo and search for improvements. So defining
it as a law to stick to the UX patterns of the majority of sites is just
wrong.

~~~
JepZ
As the down voter did not care to leave a comment, I try to give an example:

For years we were seeing the burger icon (3 horizontal bars) as an icon for
menus. It took quite a while until it became a well known standard to add some
'Menu' text next to it (as you can see it on the Laws of UX page).

So for years we had a pattern on most sites which was not optimal. Just using
it because everybody else was using it, didn't solve the problem that a
majority of users did not understand or knew the icon.

