DesignerTom's 6-Point UX Psychology Best Practices
DesignerTom's 6-Point UX Psychology Best Practices
DesignerTom's 6-Point UX Psychology Best Practices
best practices
I stress the importance of being able to make design decisions quickly, especially in the
absence of context or research which is often unavailable to us on dysfunctional teams.
As problem solvers, we have three building blocks of foundation to inform our design
decisions:
When making decisions, we build our context linearly. Start with 1 and in the absence of
3, fallback on 2, and so on.
1. Jakob's Law
2. Hick's Law
3. Weber's Law
4. Miller's Law
5. Progressive Disclosure
6. Chunking
1. Jakob's Law
Your customers expect your product to behave like other similar products.
One of the best ways to compensate for a lack of quality research is to default to
Jakob's Law. Practical examples include:
2. Hick's Law
The more options you provide, the harder it will be for your customers to make decisions.
This is my go-to workaround reference for those collaborators that start to advocate for
junk-drawer navigations and dashboards. Practical examples include:
● Advocate for A/B testing instead of "give them all the things'
● Provide packaged options (e.g. themes) instead of granular options (e.g.
changing every widget color)
● "Make the customer ask for it" instead of "take it away if they don't need it"
3. Weber's Law
Introducing new ideas in bite-sized servings will prevent the 2018 Snapchat fiasco that
lost them 2% of their users in 3 months. Plus, it encourages a better culture of testing.
Practical examples include:
● Introduce redesigns in small bites over 6-12 months
● A/B test a single affordance (e.g. button placement)
● Change parent navigation items first, child navigation items second
4. Miller's Law
Your customers can only keep 7 (+/- 2) items in their working memory at a time.
When they say that "good designers take things away", this is why we do it. Cognitive
overload is easy to violate during requirements planning. It's also easy to solve for.
Practical examples include:
● Use the z-axis to keep context slightly in view (e.g. a popout on top of a data
table)
● Organize content into groups (e.g. tabs) to make them easily referenceable
● Avoid step-workflows that require the user to remember data from previous
steps
5. Progressive Disclosure
Your customers will be less overwhelmed if you show them new information as they
request it.
● Use 6-7 priority table columns and hiding other info behind a popup on-hover
● Display a top-level metric and hiding its historical data behind a "view history"
link
● Display a list of users and hide their management workflows behind an "edit"
link
6. Chunking
While there are a number of psychological principles that belong in a tier just below this
list, these 6 are by far my most frequently referenced. Reply to this e-mail and let me
know if there are any Tier 1 principles you think deserve a mention.