I haven't done user interface design, in anger, for 20+ years. Before the kids renamed it "UX" (old wine, new bottles).
Anywho. We used to consider Fitts' Law, Hick's Law, and so forth. Celebrity UI designers (ahem) like Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini and Jakob Nielsen would belabor these seemingly obvious design considerations ad nauseum.
Your Big-O suggestion could be a nice heuristic for scoring and ranking design alternatives. Cool.
Not that design intent ever mattered. The age old tale remains the same. Grind, iterate, validate. (Does anyone do usability testing any more?) Voilá!
Then some PHB doing drive-by mgmt decrees "Those buttons should be cornflower blue. I like the old font better. Just change it all back."
I eventually rage quit UI work. Preferring to have my good taste, experience, skill, and efforts denigrated in other domains.
It now occurs to me the audience for all that UI design advice was our bosses, not us practitioners. For appeals to authority. For populating our bookshelves, to exude the facsimile of learnedness.
My impression is that it's all quantitative post-fact A/B testing nowadays.
What is interesting, because it was widely known that quantitative usability research was mostly waste and you were much better doing 10 times the amount of it with only qualitative results.
What was not widely discussed¹ is that post-fact testing is also almost useless. It can only tell you what solution is better, but the real gain comes from discovering what problems exist.
Anywho. We used to consider Fitts' Law, Hick's Law, and so forth. Celebrity UI designers (ahem) like Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini and Jakob Nielsen would belabor these seemingly obvious design considerations ad nauseum.
Your Big-O suggestion could be a nice heuristic for scoring and ranking design alternatives. Cool.
Not that design intent ever mattered. The age old tale remains the same. Grind, iterate, validate. (Does anyone do usability testing any more?) Voilá!
Then some PHB doing drive-by mgmt decrees "Those buttons should be cornflower blue. I like the old font better. Just change it all back."
I eventually rage quit UI work. Preferring to have my good taste, experience, skill, and efforts denigrated in other domains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hick%27s_law
It now occurs to me the audience for all that UI design advice was our bosses, not us practitioners. For appeals to authority. For populating our bookshelves, to exude the facsimile of learnedness.