today's design view we're going to take a look at the Laws of Ux .There's a thin line between innovation and doing some completely, 100% new shit, and successful innovators learn how to walk it.
we are getting into the laws of UX. So, the laws of UX that I'll be talking about are just a collection of heuristics, or rules of thumb, that designers and other UX professionals should keep in mind on a daily basis. A lot of these laws are principles studied in psychology and UX is all about knowing people, the way that they think, and why they do the things that they do.
So, what better way to understand the human mind than to study psychology? I'm breaking this up into two parts for two main reasons:
- there are 20 laws that I'll be going through and I'm not trying to keep y'all here for more than 20 minutes.
- I was able to group them in a way where one group focuses more on the UI side of things and the other group focuses a little bit more on the UX side of things so...why not? There's a beautiful website that has been made that goes over each of the 20 terms and gives more resources, so I'll be sure to link that in the description.
1) Hick's Law : Hick's Law states that the time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.
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| Hick's Law |
So, if you think about analysis paralysis, this is that. If you have ever in your life use Netflix and have had trouble choosing a movie, then this is something that you have experienced.
The more choices you give people the harder it is for them to make a decision. So it's best to simplify choices by breaking things down into smaller steps. Give people one thing to focus on at a time.
Another thing that you can do to help with this phenomenon, is highlight choices that you re commend or key actions that you want people to take. If there are a number of choices that you are providing for people to choose from, recommending the ones that are made most popular or highly recommended can be helpful.
Also, use progressive onboarding. Help people do things one chunk at a time. If I'm trying to learn how to change my profile picture, that's what I'm focused on and that's what I need help with.
Progressive onboarding helps to lessen the cognitive load, which essentially just means it helps people to not have to think too hard.
You don't want to explain everything at one time. Pace yourself and space out that learning, so people can have time to actually digest the information you're giving them.
2) Jakob's Law :Jakob's Law states that users spend most of their time on other sites. When it comes to websites, most people are not going to spend most of their time on your site.
They'll be on other sites, so people will have expectations that you will be expected to meet. Their expectations will be set.
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| Jakob's-Law |
So there is a strict balance between innovation and reinventing the wheel. We don't want to introduce something completely new to the point where people have to learn basically everything.
They're going to already have their mental models set, which means that they have a way of thinking and an expectation of how things are going to work that if you're not able to meet those, then there might be some friction there.
So use those mental models so that people don't have to relearn things. When people have to learn things, it takes time, effort, and it can cause so much frustration.
It's best to just let people focus on their goals -- on the task at hand --whatever they're trying to accomplish, without having to literally figure out how to use your product.
So keep in mind, while you might have a bomb website or a bomb app, just know, that there's a standard that has been set usually by a lot of these bigger companies or by the masses.
So you trying to reinvent what a home icon looks like, might not go well for you. There's a thin line between innovation and doing some completely like 100% new shit, and successful innovators learn how to walk it.
3) Miller's Law :This law states that the average person can only hold up to about seven-is h things in their working memory at one time. I'd personally say about maybe four or five but I'm just speaking from personal experience.
So, in order to keep this in mind, it's important to present information in a manageable way. You don't want to get people too much to look at or too much to do. In psychology, there is a term called "chunking," where you group individual items into larger units.
This technique helps to improve the amount of information that people can actually remember. For example, when you think about phone numbers, thos eare 10 individual digits that we've put into 3 different groups to help usre member them.
I don't know if that's still the case today as far as help ingus remember numbers because I, personally, don't remember anybody's phone number now but it's not really required so...maybe that's why.
If you have individual pieces of information that you would like for people to remember, using grouping techniques can help.
4) Peak-End Rule : The Peak-End Rule states that people will judge an experience by its peak and it send and not by every single moment throughout the experience.
So, when it comes to your product and the experience it provides, it's most important to make sure that your critical experience points and your end points are all on point.
That means it's super important for you to understand where your product is most critical. Where is it most helpful; most valuable? Where is that point in your product, or those points, that elicit the most desired emotion that you are trying to draw out of your users.
Once you know where those point sare, it's your job to make sure that those moments are great. Keep in mind, people are going to remember negative experiences way more than they do positive ones.
So, at the very least, make sure that these points in your users 'journey through your product do not provide a negative experience.
5) Postel's Law : This is also known as the Robustness Principle. This law is all about being liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send--and I know that sounds very conceptual and ambiguous and "WTF?"...I know that doesn't make any sense, it doesn't to me.
So, let's dive deeper. You can think of your product as having two faces. Let's use the example of a website as a product.
You have the part that faces users -- so human beings -- and the part that faces the machine, like the system. So which one of those faces do you think is more importantOkay, we're back! Which one did you guess? If you guessed one or the other, you're wrong, it was a trick question.
They are both equally important. At the end of the day, your product serves people, so, of course, you have to be able to interface with human beings successfully.
However, if we're talking software, your product is also connected to the system. So how is it gonna be able to serve people, if it can't even communicate with the system upon whic hit is built? It can't, so you've got to have both.
In this law, where it talks about being "liberal in what you accept," that liberal face is on the people side. People do all sorts of things in so many different ways. They are the biggest variable.
You want your product's interaction with people to be as normal as possible and because people do so many of the same things in different ways, that can be tough to nail down. What you really have to understand when you're creating this product is: how people do the things that they do and what you will accept.
Conceptual things tend to confuse me a lot of the time sol et's throw this into an example. If there was a product that I was interacting with -- a website -- that had a form where I was supposed to enter my birthday, If we keep this within the realm of the United States, the creator of that form is still going to need to understand that people may enter their birthdates differently.
So if that product was "liberal" in what it accepted from me, I could enter: 01/02/1995 or Jan 2, 1995 and still have that be an acceptable entry. Now, bringing it back to Postel's Law where it says being "conservative in what you send," that is more so on the machine side.
The conservative face faces the machine; it faces the system. So I'm putting in my birth date information, cool. The product sees that I've entered: Jan 2, 1995.
However, this system itself was built in a way where it can only understand01/02/1995 as a date.
So, in order for the product to communicate with the system, it needs to be "conservative" in the ways in which it sends this information. That is, it can't just send in whatever I type -- it can't just send in any old thing to the system -- because the system will not understand anything that is not 01/02/1995 -- that format.
I can enter anything that I want (potentially)as far as dates go, and that product should be able to take in what I say, configure it in a way that makes sense to the system, and send only that for matto the system.
So being "liberal" and what it accepts and "conservative" in what its ends. Now, of course, constraints will be necessary. I can't type in "orange" as my birth date and have that be acceptable. So, creating constraints around things that are "out of bounds" is very important.
Now, depending on the robustness of your system, you may want to set more constraints as the creator of this product. Maybe you don't want to accept every single way people can enter a birthdate and that's fine.
But keep in mind, if you create more constraints than people typically have in normal conversation, then that can put a strain on the UX of your product.
6) Tesler's Law : also known as the Law of Conservation of Complexity. Larry Tesler, who came up with this law, actually recently passed, RIP. You might be familiar with some of his work --he is the reason why you can copy and paste -- so big ups to him.
Tesler's Law states that for any system, there is a certain amount of complexity that cannot be reduced. It's kind of similar to the Law of Conservation of Energy which states that the total energy of an isolated system is constant; it cannot be created nor destroyed.
Complexity within a system works the same way. Tesler is quoted saying, "Every application must have an inherent amount of irreducible complexity.
The only question is who will have to deal with it?" So, once you get down to it, the complexity within your system that can't be reduced is either going to be put on the user or the system.
If we take the example I just used from Postel's Law about the website where I have to enter my birthday, as the creator of that product, I need to figure out where this complexity needs to go.
If I create a very robust system, where I let users enter any type of format for a date for their birthday, I'm saving the user from that complexity but I'm adding it to my system. So if I enter, as a user, January 2, 1995, the system is going to have to do the work to transform that information to the one format that the machine actually understands.
However, if I was to take the complexity off of the system and put it on to the user, that would look like a very constrained system where I, as a user, would be required to enter all 01/02/1995 and nothing else. That way, anything that I enter is going to be automatically understood by the system. No complexity on the system side, more complexity on the user-facing side.
as creators, we have to choose where to put this complexity. Which side should it go to? What's the right answer ?Of course: it depends. (Side note: "it depends" is the most UX answer you will ever get for anything, so if you have not already experienced hearing "it depends" a lot and you're just getting into UX, just know that you will hear it many, many, many times...because it always does.) But a great way to figure this out, is to know the value or cost this complexity has on your users.
There is a way to calculate this but I won't go into it right now. I've linked an article in the description that talks more about how to actually calculate that.
7) Zeigarnik Effect : I actually don't even know if I'm saying that right but I think it's close. This states that people remember un completedor interrupted tasks more than they remember the ones they've completed.
People tend to have very intrusive thoughts when they haven't completed a goal or an objective. Your brain actually sends signals to you that lets you know that you were doing something that you did not finish. So when you think about TV shows and the cliffhangers that happen after each episode, the episode is over but the story isn't complete so this leaves you on edge on purpose.
This is done intentionally so that it stays on your mind and keeps you coming back for more. And it's part of why people get really upset when their favorite show sare cancelled before the story has been complete. Same thing with movies that have open endings.
You find yourself thinking about them a little bit more cuz the story was not over. A really good way to take advantage of this effect in design is to show progress indicators. Things like progress bars help people to understand that there are still more things to do in order to complete this action. LinkedIn does a pretty good job of using this for their profile completion.
There are a number of steps that you "need" to take in order to complete your profile and if you have not taken all of the actions that LinkedIn's creators want you to take, then they'll show you "you still have X amount of steps left before you can have an all-star profile." So, if there a reactions that you want your users to perform and finish, then using progress indicators are good way to encourage people to actually finish.
8) Pareto Principle : If you've watched or listened to part one of the UX Terms episode, then this should look familiar. The Pareto Principle is also known as the 80/20 Rule and this principle states that 80% of the effect sare a result of 20% of the causes.
Now, of course I need to use an example every time I discuss this principle because it is super conceptual to me and that is beyond my mind.
As it applies to design, your users will spend 80% of their time on only 20% of your product. So for example, Instagram, right? Anytime something happens with the timeline, Twitter goes nuts.
The timeline is not the only part of Instagram but it is the place where people spend most of their time. So, if something happens to it, like for instance, that one time when Instagram thought it would be cool to change scrolling into tapping in order to browse, everybody went crazy on Twitter because nobody was with that shit.
That one feature of Instagram caused all this chaos. The timeline is that 20% that causes the biggest issues when there's an issue.
Something so small can result in catastrophe. Thank God they changed it back -- but it can also apply to positive things as well. When it comes to productivity, for me, Is pent about 30 minutes to an hour planning out my week.
Those are usually my most successful weeks because I spent this one hour planning for 40+ hour sin the future; it made such a difference. And the same thing applies for when I don't plan out my week.
If I don't take that hour, my whole week is bound to be shitty. It's not gonna be productive at all. Of course, the 80 and 20 is not really set in stone, it can vary, but overall, it's definitely something that we can see and experience all the time.
9) Serial Position Effect : This states that people are more likely to remember the first and less items in a series.
When you're designing a series or a list, it's best to put the most important information that you want people to remember either at the start or at the end of your list. Anything that you would deem as less important, plop that baby in the middle.
Placing key actions to the far left or the far right, like in navigation, for instance, can help with memorization. This is all due to the primacy and recency effects. The primacy effect has to do with people remembering the first item in a sequence and the recency effect, you guessed it, has to do with people remembering the last item in a sequence.
This is very important to keep in mind, especially during UX research. If you're creating a survey that has multiple answer choices, or even trying to get feedback on different versions of designs, it is important to make sure that you randomized those choices in order to avoid biases as an effect of the recency or primacy effects.it makes a real difference too.
10) Parkinson's Law : This law refers to the old saying that basically states that your work orany task that you're doing, will take up the full amount of time that you have available to do it.
So, generally speaking, the time you have to perform a task is the amount of time it'll take to complete it.
Yet another abstract concept-y thing that I can't fully wrap my head around without examples, so here we go! This was originally brought up in regard to bureaucracies, so like, companies.
The bigger and organization gets, the more work it has to do; so the more work it creates for itself. Now, if we kind of take it out of that context and put it into more general things in life, you can see this in how we eat and our portion sizes.
So for example, if you were to have a huge plate and you fill that plate with food, you probably will not feel satisfied until you finish that plate.
However, if you were to have a smaller plate, maybe something that's like a regular, healthy portion size, and you finished that plate, you're gonna feel that same satisfaction as you would have if you had a bigger plate.
This is why nutritionists and other health advocates encourage people to buy smaller plates so that they can actually eat smaller portion sizes. You're still gonna be really satisfied with what you eat, it's just kind of a trick that you can play on your mind because you actually don't need all of that food.
But I think the most important application at least as it relates for me, is when considering time or time management.
We've all probably had essays or assignments that have been due. If I was to receive an essay assignment on Monday and I started on Monday, and it's due on Friday, it will take me the entire week to do.
Whereas, more realistically, if I receive that essay as sign ment and I didn't start till Thursday and that joint is due on Friday, it's just gonna take me a whole day to do that essay. It might not be as robust and fantastic as the essay in the scenario where I started on Monday but it's actually pretty damn good, especially for an essay that was started the day before.
Then it prompts you to think: how long do things actually take? This one-day essay is so good because I was forced, due to my time constraint, to think outside the box.
How else can I do this, and do this well, with the time that I'm given? So, it's very clear that I actually didn't need all week to do an essay, I could've just did it in one day, which is true for most of the tasks that I have. We often overestimate the time that we need to do things but that time constraint puts a little pressure on us to do things a little bit differently than we would have done, if we didn't have it.
It forces us to level up a little bit and think of new ways of doing things. Which is why I'm not ashamed of my procrastinator ways. I actually don't have a way that this specifically ties into UX, so if you can think of any, I would love to know.
The question I want to leave with you guys today has to do with the Parkinson's Law. I talked about how I work a little differently now after having learned what it's about, and my working style, and the time that I actually do or don't need to do certain things.
So, my question for you is: what tasks either weekly or daily so you think you can level up on, get creative with, and do in a shorter amount of time. Let me know in the comments. And that is it for part 1 of the UX laws. I hope that it was helpful for you. I hope that you learned something, took away something to apply later on or maybe even today.
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