8. Users think objects next to each other do similar things.
9. Similar items close together look like one big thing.
10. Things that look the same (color, font, etc) will look like they do the same thing.
11. The average person can remember 5-9 things at once.
12. Remove all unnecessary elements.
13. Focus on the 20% that does 80% of things.
14. Any task will inflate until all of the available time is spent.
15. People judge the experience by its beginning and end.
16. Be tolerant to whatever actions the user may take.
17. People remember the first and last items in a series.
18. You can't reduce all the complexity.
19. When one thing stands out from others in a group, it will be remembered.
20. People remember incomplete tasks, i.e. use progress bars.
4 and 12 are identical. 14 has nothing to do with UX or UI. 15, 11, and 17 are the same. 18 is an excuse masquerading as a Law. From 11-18, it feels a lot of these are pulled in from some Tim Ferriss book or some generic self-help Seven Secrets of Highly Influential People. Perhaps it believes its 15th and 17th law so much that it thinks it can hide fluff in the middle of the list.
It establishes credibility with a lawsofux.com domain them then proceeds to wreck it by violating its 7th law. It does solidly prove its first law, that if you have a pretty enough site, everyone will believe it.
Your critique is based on your interpretation of the laws which is in many cases clearly incorrect.
Take for example 15. It doesn’t say people judge by the beginning and the end, but by the peak and the end. Or 4 - representing Hick’s law as “make it simpler” misses so much nuance that the key point is completely missed.
It rather seems like you barely skimmed the page before deciding to shit on it for arbitrary reasons.
> It rather seems like you barely skimmed the page before deciding to shit on it for arbitrary reasons.
"People will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images as the simplest form possible, because it is the interpretation that requires the least cognitive effort of us."
If a website violates its own laws, that brings into question the credibility of the laws, or the credibility of the author of the website. Without credibility, it feels like a waste of time to do anything more than skim... perhaps this is a failure of UX?
Fair point about 15, but neither you nor the website managed to express Hick's Law any better than KISS.
So an example of an application of Hick's Law is when you have a huge country list dropdown. Per Hick's Law we know that presenting users with many choices is bad because it'll take them forever to make their pick. But if there's going to be a small number of options that the vast majority of users will choose, such as with countries it might be the US and a few EU countries, you can improve this by putting those countries first and presenting an alphabetically sorted list of the rest after them.
You can see how this doesn't just boil down to "make it simpler". And many of your summaries similarly miss the point.
I do admit that the website doesn't elaborate on the concepts very much. For example, if I hadn't known about Hick's law beforehand, I might have arrived at the same conclusion as you. But they do link further reading which seems to do the job of explaining the laws in detail. So I think the website is a nice reference if you go the extra mile and look at the links.
> But if there's going to be a small number of options that the vast majority of users will choose, such as with countries it might be the US and a few EU countries, you can improve this by putting those countries first and presenting an alphabetically sorted list of the rest after them.
I hate when people do this. It messes with selection by keystroke. It's frustrating and breaks the default means of using a drop-down box.
Agreed. I’d add there’s something perverse and elitist about ‘solving’ this problem by making it easier for one group of users and more difficult for the rest.
Ranking common countries first only seems like an issue because of our sensitive political climate. Or do you still think it's "perverse and elitist" to put commonly bought bus tickets before more rarely bought options like season tickets in ticket machine menus?
I don't think that's a good analogy. But my comment reads way harsher than I intended it. I've probably done it myself in the past – sticking a handful of key countries at the top of the selector. My point is it isn't good design, it's a lazy hack. And I think if I was a user from one of the 2nd tier countries, I'd find it pretty elitist. The ticket machine analogy doesn't apply.
You could also solve the problem a lot smarter by detecting the current locale and using that to determine the suggested option, or even better by using a combo box. It’s really annoying to scroll through more than 5 items in a drop down menu, no matter the content :)
I can see how it can be perceived as potentially elitist if you put certain countries on top, but it can be more of the product understanding it's market. It knows that one country is going to use it's product more than others. If it decides to expand, I would hope that it would use other potential factors to sort a likely country the user is from to the top as well.
It frustrates me too for the same reason, but for many apps the majority of users isn't advanced enough to use keyboard input to navigate dropdowns, so depending on your userbase it might make sense to do it. Especially because with this trick you're already trading the minority's UX for that of the majority anyway.
Worst thing is, that taking 1, 4, 11, 12 and 13 as a gospel ends up with stuff like macOS Big Sur. Power users are left wanting because features that are useful, but a tiny bit niche are getting either removed or hidden in shelves.
1. UI > UX.
2. Respond in less than 400 ms.
3. Make buttons clickable.
4. Make it simpler.
5. Copy functionality and UX off other sites.
6. Draw borders around similar functionality.
7. Simpler imagery is better.
8. Users think objects next to each other do similar things.
9. Similar items close together look like one big thing.
10. Things that look the same (color, font, etc) will look like they do the same thing.
11. The average person can remember 5-9 things at once.
12. Remove all unnecessary elements.
13. Focus on the 20% that does 80% of things.
14. Any task will inflate until all of the available time is spent.
15. People judge the experience by its beginning and end.
16. Be tolerant to whatever actions the user may take.
17. People remember the first and last items in a series.
18. You can't reduce all the complexity.
19. When one thing stands out from others in a group, it will be remembered.
20. People remember incomplete tasks, i.e. use progress bars.
4 and 12 are identical. 14 has nothing to do with UX or UI. 15, 11, and 17 are the same. 18 is an excuse masquerading as a Law. From 11-18, it feels a lot of these are pulled in from some Tim Ferriss book or some generic self-help Seven Secrets of Highly Influential People. Perhaps it believes its 15th and 17th law so much that it thinks it can hide fluff in the middle of the list.
It establishes credibility with a lawsofux.com domain them then proceeds to wreck it by violating its 7th law. It does solidly prove its first law, that if you have a pretty enough site, everyone will believe it.