Most often, UX, UI and Graphic Design are used interchangeably. User Experience is about the way that the user experiences and interacts the given product. User Experience(UX) design is more about improving the utility, ease of use and efficiency. Although such a field is based on subjectivity, it takes insipration from Human-Computer Interaction. Let’s see what drives UX design?

1. Fitts’s Law

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

Fitts’s Law allows us to see how much time it takes for the user to engage with a given object. Time it takes for the user to engage directly correlates to whether the user will perform the given action and whether the product as a whole can be classified as ‘easy to use’.

Key understandings to Fitts’s Law are:

A. Touch targets should be large enough for users to discern what it is and accurately select them.

B. Touch targets should have adequate spacing between one another

C. Touch target placement should allow them to be easily accessed

2. Jakob’s Law

“Users spend most of their time on other sites, and they prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”

Familiarity of the product allows your users to feel right at home even if its their first time here. By grasping on subtle clues, they spend a lesser mental load to understand the product and thus can pursue their objectively.

Users build mental models of how they think the world works, based on past experiences. So, experience in filling manual forms and ticking checkboxes, lead to the virtualized checkbox. Toggling light switches leads to the Toggle button, and these evolved from each of their tactile counterparts.

Contrary to what you may be thinking, Jakob’s Law isn’t advocating for ‘sameness’ in your designs. It just suggests that one should use common conventions as much as possible. Designing around the user’s expectations of how something will work will allow them to reach your core ‘secret sauce’ easier.

3. Hick’s Law

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

A key job of a designer is to present information in a way that the user can understand how to use this information. Redundancy and Excessiveness leads to frustration and confusion. The way to ideally design would be to understand what the user wishes to achieve and then remove anything that does not enable them to achieve this.

The user spends his mental energy to understand how the service works and how to find the information they are looking for. So while learning how the service operates they must also remember their objective. A simple example is the poorly designed radios of old which had a vast number of buttons, & features most of which were superfluous.

Now logically extrapolating, one can even oversimplify, remove abstractions to the point where its no longer clear what actions are available, or how to pursue our objective.

4. Miller’s Law

“The average person can only keep 7 (± 2) items in their working memory.”

This law is usually misinterpreted, in the sense that Miller’s original observation was that memory span in young adults was approximately 7, regardless of the extra information presented. This lead him to theorize that information is chunked in the mind and memorized together. He even discovered that the size of the chunks didn’t seem to matter, it could be 7 words, or 7 numbers.

So when we start to present information its easier to chunk the information. If you take any dense information, its always easier to read it, if it had been arranged into a set of points instead of a long unending paragraph.

5. Postel’s Law

“Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.”

Humans are a myriad of experiences and are error prone due to the fact that we are driven by emotion. Good UX implies designing a good human experience. So how do we cater to all these emotions?

The law in itself is vague, and implies something else. The author Jon Postel was the author of an early TCP protocol, the law itself was a guideline for software design. The idea was to accept any kind of input but to ensure that the output that is given is rigid.

By designing for any number of inputs, we can take the topic of internationalization. Languages are tricky for design, some work left-to-right others right-to-left, some don’t have words to express equivalent words. By designing for all these, we can create robust designs.

6. 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 of every moment of the experience.”

This is a crucial idea that leads to the idea that one strong negative or a one strong positive emotion will sway the perception of the whole service.

Cognitive biases are patterns of deviation from rationality in judgement or behavior due to an underlying reason. You could say, that they are what introduce subjectivity in human behavior. The peak-end rule is a cognitive bias known as memory bias because it impairs the true recollection of the memory.

By designing for the most intense points of usage, the users experience will be made simpler. For example most of the times whenever we encounter a website that doesn’t exist, the best experiences are from websites that design a funny or witty remark.

7. Aesthetic-Usability Effect

“Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable”

The aesthetically pleasing design allows people to be more positive and leads them to believe that the design works better. There is a caveat, since people will be more forgiving with usability issues, this can be problematic when you wish to identify issues. Mitigation of this is to see what the users do rather than listen to what the users said they did.

You can see this very starkly in Apple products. The interfaces created are beautifully designed and usually functionally minimalist. And yet even when there may be legitimate usability issues people are more likely to overlook these issues.