Psychology’s Greatest Hits: UX Edition

During my boot camp, I started connecting with and following various UX thought leaders online. Many of them were recommending Jon Yablonski’s new book ‘Laws of UX’ as a great way to apply psychology to design rationale. Specifically, this book was mentioned frequently by those who didn’t have a ton of resources to conduct user research; rather, they were looking for ways to improve experiences relatively quickly - to get buy-in to do further work. I decided to give Yablonski’s book a read and I’m super glad I did!

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The 10 Laws

Yablonski discusses 10 laws in this book: all focused on understanding human behavior from a zoomed-out perspective. This, in turn, allows designers to spend more time testing specific aspects of their designs rather than reinventing the wheel.

1) Jakob’s Law (2000) - users user their own mental models to navigate your product; they prefer your product to work the same way as other products they already know

2) Fitts’s Law (1954) - targets should be of reasonable size with reasonable spacing and should be placed in areas that allow them to be easily acquired

3) Hick’s Law (1952) - the time it takes to make decisions increases with the number and complexity of the choices available

4) Miller’s Law (1956) - users only have so much working memory; use content chunking to help users process and remember things more easily

5) Postel’s Law - be empathetic to various actions users might take or inputs they might provide; the more we anticipate, the more resilient designs will be

6) Peak-End Rule (1993) - people judge experiences largely based on how they felt at the peak of the experience and at the end; pay attention to the most intense points of the user journey

7) Aesthetic-Usability Effect (1995) - users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable; users are more tolerant of usability issues in this context

8) Von Restorff Effect (1993) - when multiple similar objects are present, users usually remember the one that differs from the rest; make important actions distinctive

9) Tesler’s Law (1980s) - in any system, there is a certain amount of complexity that cannot be reduced; don’t simplify things to the point of abstraction

10) Doherty Threshold (1982) - the ideal time for user/computer system feedback is <400ms; adding delays to instant processes can increase their perceived value and build trust

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Ethical Decision-Making

“While there’s nothing inherently wrong with leveraging the insights from behavioral and cognitive psychology to help create better designs, it’s critical that we consider how products and services have the potential to undermine the goals and objectives of the people using them, why accountability is critical for those creating those products and services, and how we can slow down and be more intentional.”

Yablonski does a great job at being a facilitator (keeping ethical decision-making in mind) and talks about the dangers of modifying user behaviors for the worst. Along with the above quote, he also notable states:

“The commercial imperatives to increase time on site, streamline the consumption of media and advertising, or extract valuable data don’t match up with human objectives of accomplishing a task, staying connected with friends or family, and so on. In other words, the corporate goals of the business and the human goals of the end user are seldom aligned, and more often than not designers are a conduit between them.”

He argues that the best way to combat this dynamic is to slow things down and consider implications to as much of an extent as possible. He urges us to think beyond the ‘happy paths’ that are so often the only path for designers to work within.

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Applying Psychology to Design Principles

My biggest takeaway from Yablonski’s book was his model for applying laws of UX into design system documentation (this can be casual or formal). He provides a few examples of a design principle, connecting it to a psychological law and then providing specific ways to do so within an interface. For example:

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Thoughts on the book

This book felt similar to ‘100 Things Designers Need to Know About People’ but with ways of applying information directly to design decisions. I appreciated Yablonski’s candor when talking about ethical decision-making and how much of a responsibility we have to our users. My favorite part of the book was seeing how he applies the laws of UX to design decisions (as stated above); I’ve started to see this same basic documentation practice more and more in design systems.

This was a great read! He has inspired me to re-read my psychology introductory textbook which has been a wealth of knowledge! One of the last lines of the book does a stellar job at communicating the value that learning more about psychology/human behavior has in the design industry:

“The most effective way to leverage psychology in the design process is to embed it into everyday decision making”