6 Laws that Help You Create a Better Design
There is one common goal of every product — to make the users’ life easier. As a designer, you are given a mission to make this happen. To design a product that everyone would enjoy using, you may want to incorporate principles from different academic areas in your design process. Below I am going to show you some famous principles from psychology, philosophy and economics that you can apply to your design.
1. Hick’s Law
Hick’s law, a psychology principle that is named after two psychologists, William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman, states that the more options available for the users, the longer time it will take for them to make a decision.
Choices seem to be good but a great UX design should remove all the clusters and help user fix a problem smoothly and swiftly. When there are lots of options available, your users would need to learn, consider and weigh all the options before making up their mind. That means it takes a longer time to reach their goal. Apart from this, more options could mean more problems, especially if there is no clear explanation for each option.
Rule of thumb for UX: More options, more problems. — Scott Belsky
2. Jakob’s Law
Jakob’s law was invented by Jakob Neilsen, a user advocate. This law states that your users prefer your website to work in the same way as other websites. For instance, if your website has lots of content, there should be a search function, your website footer should contain links to important pages, your website logo should be clickable and linked to the homepage. Users do not like surprises, they prefer something that is familiar so they wouldn’t need to learn how to use your website.
Asking users to adopt new behaviours or even modify their existing behaviours is very, very hard. — Khoi Vin
3. Fitts’s Law
Fitts’s law is a predictive model of human movement developed by Paul Fitts, an American psychologist. When it is used in a design, it means that your buttons should be large, obvious and the distance between one action to the next should be minimised.
Make it simple, but significant. — Don Draper
4. Ockham’s Razor
Ochkam’s Razor is a philosophy principle by William of Ockham, a Franciscan friar in the 14th century. There are different variations of this principle but it is roughly about when there are multiple solutions to a problem, the simplest one tends to be the best one. When this applies to a design, it means:
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication — Leonardo da Vinci
When designing a product or a website, try to get rid of the unnecessaries as they create clusters and distraction. These make it difficult for your users to reach their goal.
5. Pareto Principle
Pareto Principle, as known as 80/20 rule, is named after an Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. This principle says that 80% of the outcome come from 20% of the cause. When this is used in product design, it means that the unused functions or features could be removed due to the fact that they do not contribute to the outcome. This is similar to Ockham’s Razor as both principles suggest the same — the simpler, the better.
Get rid of everything that is not essential to making a point. — Christoph Niemann
6. Weber’s Law - Just Noticeable Difference
Weber’s law is named after a German physician, Ernst Heinrich Weber. The law explains that the perceived change in stimuli is proportional to the original stimuli, together with the just noticeable difference, it means that the size of the just noticeable difference (the slightest change in stimuli that can be observed or noticed) is in proportion to the original stimuli. When we redesign a product, we should think about how the users adapt to the changes. Usually, if your product has a drastic change, no matter how good the new design is, the users would still think the old one is better. This is a natural human behaviour. What you should do instead is — change gradually, so gradually that the users could not see a significant difference. This helps them adapt to and accept the new design.
If you do it right, it will last forever. — Massimo Vignelli
Conclusion
Apart from the basic design principles, there are other rules or laws that you can follow to make your design stand out. The above are the famous laws from other academic areas, but there are more rules that are very useful for designers, for instance rule of thirds and the golden ratio. If you are interested in learning more about the basic design principles and rule of thirds, check out the articles below:
Finally:
The design process, at its best, integrates the aspirations of art, science, and culture. — Jeff Smith
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