User Experience has it’s foundations strongly rooted in psychology & behavioural sciences, after all, many of our daily actions and thoughts are subconscious!

As designers, this gives us the ability to much better understand how our users operate, think, and interact with our products, and we can categorise those in what are called the ‘Laws of UX’. Let’s understand a few interesting ones that can upgrade your UX toolkit!

Hick’s Law

Define: Hick’s Law shows us that when users are given more choices or more complex choices, time to complete a decision increases.

Takeaways:

• Keep things simple for your users.
• When converting a user, make it clear, concise and quick.
• Minimise choices in order to prevent cognitive overload

Aesthetic Usability Effect

Define: The Aesthetic Usability Effect outlines that users tend to perceive visually attractive products as usable & effectively designed; whether or not this is actually the case.

Takeaways:

• Keep visual design in mind without taking away from actual experience.
• Understanding your users can be more tolerant to minor experience problems with attractive design.
• Well placed visual design can act as an effective constraint.

Jakob’s Law

Define: Jakob’s Law tells us that users time is spread across many other websites and apps, and prefer products to work similarly to each other.

Takeaways:

• Don’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to user experience.
• Study the competition to create a similar experience.
• Leverage existing subconscious models in order to create fluid experiences.

Law of Proximity

Define: The Law of Proximity explains that when objects are close to each other, they are subconsciously seen as a group.

Takeaways:

• Using proximity, we can create relationships with elements.
• We can infer that elements close to each other function similarly.
• Utilise distance to organise information for reduced cognitive load.

Pareto Principle

Define: The Pareto Principle states that in events, roughly 80% of the effect(s) comes from 20% of the cause(s)

Takeaways:

• Focus efforts on areas that produce the greatest results, and provide the most benefit to users.
• Overy large teams may only contain a select few contributors that drive the product towards the goal.
• Cause & effects are not even.

Serial Position Effect

Define: The Serial Position Effect tells us that we tend to remember the first and last items in a series with the greatest recall.

Takeaways:

• Place important items & information where the user will either see it first, or last.
• If information is desired to be occluded, keep it in the middle of content.
• This effect also carries over towards how we read a screen, with the far left & right being easily memorable.

In Summary

Kitted up with 6 principles of psychological design, we are now better equipped to create usable and enjoyable experiences for you user.

Studying the psychology of User Experience & Design is a lengthy endeavour, with many interesting topics nested inside, but understanding how we operate and use products gives us an incredible edge!

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