For effective UI design, all elements must be balanced and placed harmoniously so that users can easily perceive information and interact with a product effortlessly. Since the best designs are user-centric, it helps to take advantage of dominant mental models or create designs that meet users` expectations. For example, users expect to find the “shopping cart” on an e-commerce site in the navigation bar. The most elegant design can fail if it forces users to adapt to the design instead of working in the “blueprint” of how people perceive and treat the world around them. Think of an ecommerce website and you`ll probably think of an experience similar to Amazon. Many ecommerce sites use the same templates because the user is familiar with a standardized design, so they already know how to use your site based on their experience with other sites. When it comes to design, designers are often obsessed with appearance and appeal rather than functionality and accessibility. Most of us try to make things beautiful. It is not uncommon for this to lead to aesthetics becoming more important to designers than usability. Of course, aesthetics are important and we should definitely try to make our designs attractive, but only after having usable products. The most important task of digital products and services is to perform a function. Since a visual representation of UI elements has a huge impact on the user experience, visual hierarchy is one of the basic techniques applied to the design process.
Exchanging UX with UI design as if the two were the same is a common mistake among many designers. It`s important to understand the difference between the two disciplines, and we`ve covered the topic of UX design in detail in the What You Need to Know About User Experience article. In short, the user interface is the space where interactions between people and a product take place, while user experience is an emotional outcome after interactions with a product. The law also emphasizes the importance of foresight and proper planning in the design process, because when you add more features to a product, your user interface must be able to accommodate those new features without destroying the visual basis of what you`ve created. Rebuilding a foundation requires a tremendous amount of time and resources. UI UX laws are an understanding of psychology – particularly the psychology behind user behavior and interaction with digital interfaces – is perhaps the most valuable non-conceptual skill a designer can have. As one of Jakob Nielsen`s original 10 heuristics for usability, visibility into system state remains one of the most important principles in UI design. Users want to know their current context in a system at any given time, and applications shouldn`t let them guess – they need to tell the user what`s going on through proper visual feedback. Providing instant visual feedback, such as an animated announcement when a user initiates an operation, is a great way to let users know that an interface is working.
Whether you`re a beginner UX designer or an experienced product marketer, you need to know the basic laws of UX. Jacob`s Law is about patterns and understanding products that your user may already be familiar with. Often, we don`t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to design. The solutions to many of our problems may already exist, so it`s always worth doing your research. This means that consumers perceive visually similar elements in a design, such as those that have the same color, size, shape, orientation, and movement as those that are related in meaning or functionality. Because of this, clicked links have a different color than those that are not. Google`s purple color for a link you`ve visited is a great example: shading a group of elements, adding a background color, or setting elements in the header, footer, and navigation pane are ways to create common areas for interactive themes. Designers often assume that the people who use their interfaces are just as they are. As a result, designers project their behavior and reactions onto users. But thinking that you are your user is a mistake.
This effect is called false consensus in psychology – a tendency to assume that others share our beliefs and behave similarly in a particular context. “Don`t let users think” is a common saying in product design. Designers should strive to reduce the cognitive load on the user and reduce interaction costs by designing products that are easy to use. The above principles should be part of your design toolbox. Applied correctly, they can help you create a better user experience for your users. Jon Yablonski is an award-winning digital designer and senior product designer working at General Motors on the next generation of interactive in-vehicle experiences. His passion lies at the intersection of interaction design and development. Jon writes about his design experiences for publications such as A List Apart, Smashing Magazine, and CSS Tricks. Understanding the limitations of users` short-term memory can greatly improve the usability of an application. Most users have a relatively short attention span. By using menus with just a few items or bundled options, you can help users navigate a website faster or select a product quickly and easily. You can take advantage of the serial position effect in your UX design by: Essentially, too many choices lead to paralysis of selection or analysis, i.e.
information overload that prevents users from taking action. So limit the options available. For example, HelpScout`s navigation bar design contains only essential categories: It`s important to remember that Fitts` law generally doesn`t apply to mobile devices. Although there is no cursor to reach a target location, a designer can use the distance from one faucet to another to hinder or sustain an interaction. For example, a “logout” icon can be placed at the top of the mobile screen, and the confirmation can be displayed at the bottom. Due to the limitations of human memory, designers need to ensure that users can automatically recognize how to use certain features of their product, rather than letting them remember this information. Strive to minimize cognitive load by making information and interface functions visible and easily accessible. This is one of the psychology principles used by designers to improve the user experience in various applications. Of course, by nature, users place a different value on an element depending on whether it is isolated or placed next to other possible alternatives.
Maze helps create amazing user experiences backed by user information that give your designs more confidence. Hedwig von Restorff, the psychiatrist behind this UX law, made a simple observation: pack information that you want to visually draw attention to. That`s why CTA buttons tend to have different colors than the rest of the design, like in this pop-up from Sleeknote. Research shows that users don`t like a massive change to their existing products, even if those changes benefit them. If you do a major redesign, chances are users won`t be happy with it. This phenomenon even has a scientific name – Weber`s law of perceptible differences, which states that the slightest change in things does not lead to a noticeable difference. Simply put, designing according to existing mental models reduces the friction associated with learning to navigate a design. This, in turn, improves the user experience as users can easily focus on the task at hand. In this article, let`s look at 21 UX laws originally organized by product designer Jon Yablonski in his book and resource Laws of UX. We`ll also look at examples so you can better understand how to put each law into practice. Let`s see how the golden ratio can improve UI designs. I wrote this book to make the complex laws of psychology accessible to more designers—especially designers who don`t have a background in psychology or behavioral science.
The intersection of psychology and UX design has become an increasingly relevant topic at a time when design roles are having an increasing impact on organizations.