User experience laws and principles
These definitions are written as short, accessible descriptions, informing a brief understanding of Neurotypes and User Experience Design Principles.
I strongly recommend reading further to "fully" understand conditions and practices.
Law of Prägnanz
The Law of Prägnanz (or Pragnanz) suggests people will interpret groups of complex and ambiguous shapes in the simplest form possible. Our brains prefer to simplify complex visual information to prevent us from becoming overwhelmed.
Law of Uniform Connectedness
The Law of Uniform Connectedness suggests elements that share a visual commonality such as line, colour, or shape are perceived as more connected and grouped than elements with no commonality. Elements with at least one shared characteristic can be visually recognised as belonging to the same group.
Miller's Law
Miller's Law simply suggests people hold an average of seven things in their working memory they can accurately identify. An individual's short-term memory capacity will vary from person to person. Organising content into smaller, bite-sized chunks helps information recognition and memory processing.
Aesthetic-Usability Effect
The Aesthetic-Usability Effect suggests people are more tolerant of minor usability problems when an interface has an aesthetically pleasing design. People may also consider a visually appealing interface as working better than a less pleasing design. However, usability issues can be hidden as a result and negatively impact an experience later.
Fitts's Law
Fitts's Law describes the time it takes to click a target based on the size, distance, and position of the target. Interactive elements must be large enough for faster and easier clicks. The speed-accuracy trade-off for small targets results in higher error rates.
Occam's Razor
Occam's Razor is a principle of problem-solving to select the one answer that makes the fewest assumptions. Analysing and removing excessive features without compromising the overall function, will add greater value to the user experience.
Von Restorff Effect
The Von Restorff Effect suggests one visually unique object among a group of visually similar objects will be remembered. One black sheep in a flock of white sheep stands out more than any other. Important elements or key actions must appear visually distinctive or not compete for attention.
Tesler's Law
Teslers's Law (also known as The Law of Conservation of Complexity) demonstrates that a system's complexity cannot be simplified beyond its condition to function. All actions and processes require some degree of complexity. It's important to simplify those actions but never beyond the point of abstraction to confusion.
Complexity Paradox
The Complexity Paradox often presents itself as a "complexity bias" that results in the attitude that more complexity means a better experience. The overproduction of adding more features to a system implies adding more value to the user experience but may create Choice Paralysis (also known as Analysis Paralysis) instead.
Jakob's Law
Jakob's Law suggests people will happily adopt a system when they are used to using familiar systems on the Web. A person feels safe and secure when using a component or performing an action that follows a convention. Positioning elements in predictable locations gives people confidence and encouragement to interact with a new system.
Parkinson's Law
Parkinson's Law suggests the time taken to complete a task or action will increase to consume the allotted time given. If a person has all day to finish something, they often use the "full day" to complete it. Decreasing the time to finish a task from the expected duration will improve the overall user experience.
Peak-End Rule
Peak-End Rule suggests a cognitive bias of experiences depends on how they end. People will judge an experience largely based on how it made them feel at the peak or end, rather than the experience as a whole.
Postel's Law
Postel's Law (also known as the Robustness Principle) provides guidelines for designing scalable and complex experiences that are intuitive and human-centric. Expecting high complexity when designing a system, the more resilient the system will be. "Be liberal in what you accept, be conservative in what you send". Consider a universal design for learning online.
Doherty Threshold
The Doherty Threshold demonstrates that people's attention and productivity increase when interaction response is within 400 milliseconds. Delayed system feedback visualised by an animation can create trust and value in an action (progress bar or uploading files) even when the processing time is not accurate.