Blog 29: Best practices while designing your UX

Our previous blog highlighted the UI best practices (see blog 28).

UX best practices are also known as the important laws of UX. 

UI design vs. UX design

• UI design focuses on the visual and interactive elements of the product, like layout, typography, colours, icons, and buttons.

• UX design is concerned with the overall user experience, like the general purpose of the product and how the user feels about it.

Laws of UX is a collection of best practices that designers can consider. One can learn about them from this website https://lawsofux.com

There are four types.

1. Heuristic: Problem-solving by experimental and trial-and-error methods.

   1. Aesthetic-Usability Effect: Users perceive aesthetic design as more usable.

   2. Fitts’s Law: Time to acquire a target is a function of distance and its size.

   3. Goal-Gradient Effect: Tendency to approach a goal increases with proximity.

   4. Hick’s Law: Time to make a decision increases with number & complexity of choices.

   5. Jakob’s Law: Users prefer a app to work in a same way as the other apps they use.

   6. Miller’s Law: An average person can keep 7 (+/- 2) items in their working memory.

   7. Parkinson’s Law: Reduce the time it takes to complete a task (vs. what users expect).

2. Principle: Kind of rule, belief, or idea that guides you.

   1. Doherty Threshold: Productivity improves when a computer and its users interact at a pace (<400ms).

   2. Occam’s Razor: Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.

   3. Pareto Principle: Approximately 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

   4. Postel’s Law: Accept variable input and define its boundaries. Provide clear feedback to the user.

   5. Tesler’s Law: Every system has a certain amount of complexity that cannot be reduced.

3. Gestalt: Made of many parts and yet is more than or different from its parts.

   1. Law of common Region: Elements, sharing an area, tend to be perceived as a group.

   2. Law of Proximity: Objects that are near tend to be grouped together.

   3. Law of Pragnanz: Users try to find simplicity and order in complex shapes.

   4. Law of Similarity: Elements that are visually similar will be perceived as related.

   5. Law of Uniform Connectedness: Elements that are visually connected are perceived as more related.

4. Cognitive bias: Inclinations in human thinking that often do not comply with the tenets of logic, probability reasoning, and plausibility.

   1. Peak-End Rule: People judge an experience based on how they feel at its peak and at its end.

   2. Serial Position Effect: Users have a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a series.

   3. Von Restorff Effect (Isolation Effect): When multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs will be remembered.

   4. Zeigarnik Effect: Indication of progress, to users, will motivate them to complete tasks.

If you would like the learn more about each law, please visit https://lawsofux.com

Note: Refer Blog 52 that talks about a popular design methodology i.e., Design Thinking.

Jump to blog 100 to refer to the overall product management mind map.

I wish you the best for your journey. 😊