Discovered this site a few years back and recommended it to everyone who joins my team. Interesting stuff.

What's your favourite law among the 21?

Can someone explain the takeaways 1. and 3. for the Law of Prägnanz to me?

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The more complex the graphic the more detail the viewer will skip over.

Basic plain circle and circle with dot in the middle? You'll spot the difference easily so they work as two distinct elements.

22 sided polygon with gothic inspired pattern in the middle vs 18 sided polygon with art nouveau pattern? The viewer will simplify them down to "circle with stuff inside" and miss the differences.

Rule number 12 of 21: The average person can only keep 7 items in their working memory 🤔

Use easy shapes got it.

The Modern Warfare 2 Devs should see this 💀

Why does the website feel like font size 300? Is this only me?

Interestingly, I imagine these "laws" help explain how conspiracy theories develop.

Who is Lawso, and what does he Fux?

Ahh, because my screen is 32"... Should a font size range be part of UX laws?

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Haha, that was my first thought as well.

One of the guys in my squad is a marketing dude and was ranting about "depth first design" and "hulu's crappy designers" last night.

It would be so much more useful if the linked site weren't just a nice-looking page giving the written definitions of the concepts, but actually showed examples of the effects/principles that they're seeking to convey. It's a beautiful website, sure (how much time did the person spend on those symbols/tiles alone?), but not what I expect when someone stands up an entire website to show graphical concepts.

In a way, it is itself an example of the mistake of form over function.

Why use complex shape when simple shape do trick

that leading of the top descriptions/top NAV is killing me

I've heard this is why phone numbers are 7 digits. Not sure how true that is.

*whom do they fux

Maybe if your filtering for a specific type of person?

The 22nd law states that information density is for suckers. Make everything touchable by someone wearing boxing gloves, even on keyboard+mouse interfaces.

This is a lot better than the last time it was posted. I still have some gripes with how many of them are presented as "laws", but many important UX concepts here.

They're 10 now

> Provide system feedback within 400 ms in order to keep users’ attention and increase productivity.

That’s… that’s slightly better than twice a second. What sort of feedback they need so often to keep them interested? Damn. Imagine if while shopping Amazon they flashed a thumbs up emoji every 400ms.

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Yeah, hilarious that in being a UX site it's committing essentially the cardinal sin of UX.

Also a matter of knowing your users, and designing for the human- I imagine the desired audience of the site are UX professionals and people with an interest in UX, but it's presented like marketing copy for C suite folks.

But maybe that's the target audience, in which case I'd say it's successful. Would be curious to see an interview with the creator.

Honestly, the whole time I was reading through the site, all I felt was:

"Wow! The design of this website really sucks!"

Tiles and text are all way too big. No real examples of anything in action. The reference links, rather than the actual content, comprise a majority of each card's page. Plus, it takes like 5 scrolls to get from the top to the bottom of a page that really has very minimal content.

I miss the days when web design was centered on having all information and links together on the screen without the need to scroll around. Ever since web 2.0 and touch screens, now we get gigantic fonts, minimalist unlabeled icons, and fancy scrolling effects.

Honestly, most games have horrid UX in menus and elsewhere, especially from an accessibility standpoint.

I find it amazing that some game developers spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing a game (looking at you, R*) and their menus feel like they were designed by a 9 y/o. Horrendous information architecture, layouts, readability, performative actions, etc.

RDR2’s menus are some of the worst offenders and that game is absolutely brilliant.

Doubtful. It's also chunks of information, not just pure units- you remember 695 432 0118 better than if I had asked you to recall 6, 9, 5, 4, 3, 2, 0, 1, 1, and 8.

Or if I asked you to remember "may boat horse" versus "a a b e h m o o r s t y"

Touch/clickability is a concern! The general rule I've heard is that you want at minimum a 1 cm by 1 cm square target for anything you want users to touch on a mobile interface.

It’s quite ironic. I’ve been using this site for my job going on 3 years now (not regularly mind you) and for a lot of the laws I have to do additional research to find how it applies to the interfaces I design.

I think it meant when user did an action (touch/click), it feels bad if the feedback (pop up/drop down) takes >400ms to appear.

So not every 400ms but within 400ms after actions.

Yea was definitely designed for mobile not computers. There should be a law about "The better a UX is for mobile/portrait, the worse it is for PCs/landscape"

>Progress bars help make wait times tolerable, regardless of their accuracy.

Holy shit, I finally found literal Satan!

Ah. Yea that makes more sense.

except most people only need to deal with a few prefixes so those are usually "chunked" into one. I'd argue for 8 "things".

Phone number length is based on how many different numbers you need, that's why they added more digits over time.

They're missing "Users tend to think differently than developers; what seems obvious and simple to the person who wrote the code may be inscrutable to the person attempting to use the product."

That's true, but too many designers stop at mobile and decide that "it should scale to desktop". That's how you get, well, The Laws of UX's site. It's only "progressive" in the sense that it can tell phones from not-phones, but it treats everything that's not a phone like the same device. My 11" tablet, 13" laptop, and 27" desktop monitor all show exactly 1 1/2 rows of 3 cards.

Microsoft, your ribbon UX could use a little professional redux. A decade later and that monstrosity is still shittier than a standard menu.

Good call. We can name it the puffbro conjecture.

Unless it's a 'close', 'X' or 'reject all' button in which case it should be a 1 mm by 1 mm target blended in with the background.

Of course. I remember in the 90s in New England they started using the area code for local calls.

Digon best shape

I always thought the weapon wheel on RDR2 was well designed, for how many items you have available to use.

11+ if you include the country code.

Yeah, it's anecdotal but it was a nice story.

Yep lmao! Those, and various other psychological or design tricks to manipulate people into doing or not doing something the company/product/designer wants are called "dark patterns".

Yes, that's generally how things shake out. This one seems like a personal project more than anything, but in my experience it's a miracle if you can convince a company that having separate mobile and desktop interfaces is advisable, much less getting buy-in for a fully scaling interface that adapts to screen size.

It's also difficult because outside of fully regular gridded interfaces (which, in all fairness, this site is), there are diminishing returns once you hit desktop size. And user flows can be interrupted or the false bottom effect (where there is content beyond the bottom of the screen, but the user doesn't realize it's there because what they can see cleanly cuts off at the bottom of the screen) can come into play if an interface is designed to scale with screen size.

The weapon wheel is just OK. Not great, not terrible. The problem is they were trying to go with a certain aesthetic and it makes all of the items incredibly hard to differentiate being that they’re all white on black with no labels. This is far worse a problem in the satchel menu and what not. The weapon wheel was easier since the shape definitions were easier to differentiate.

Your points are definitely fair. I just felt like I adapted to RDR2 rather quickly, whereas I still can't figure out GTA.

That’s a fair assessment. Perhaps they made some slight improvements compared to GTA5. I wonder how bad the menus will be in 6 lol.

Years ago I found R*’s lead UX designer on LinkedIn but was unable to message him. I wanted to see if he know what he was doing, and if so, how much leverage he had in the company to promote proper UX practices. I kinda want his job lol

You already knew it was going to be when you saw the link

The weapon stats bars that are on a scale of what feels like 0-10,000, taking up only 1% of the screen and each attachment seems to change them ±5 out of the 10,000.

​

Squinting SO hard to see if damage increases even on my 75" tv.

IIRC, the phone system was modified in the 90s to allow multiple area codes in one geographic area.

As late as the late 1970s, in some areas, if you were calling a different number in the same exchange, all you had to dial was the last 4 digits. For example, if your number was 555-1212 and you wanted to call 555-1234, all you had to dial was 1234.

Beautiful is a mighty stretch

It’s 3-5 things in active memory. Phone numbers and Social Security numbers are chunked into three sets for this reason. Give a user more than 3 sets of information at once and you risk them having a difficult time as their brain tries to assess priority. Also note that active memory is different than short term memory.

Endless Space 2 mastered this. If you look at it, it's kinda bland. If you play it, it's the most useful, smartly designed excel sheet ever that somehow manages to make space feel alive and rich with life.

A daily painful part of my job. Having developers question every step with smart solutions but solutions that someone’s grandma in Nebraska would never understand. Good UX is for everyone.

As someone planning on going into ux this is awesome, thanks

Postel's 'law', namely to be flexible in the input you accept but not in your output and feedback, is somewhat related. But it does not fully cover it...

You sound like an over 40 developer (I’m not far off the same so not an insult). Users understand how to scroll these days and so it instinctively, size is subjective.

It was super hard to differentiate between the options though, most looked alike. Colors would have been nice

My conspiracy theory is that they made the ux unintuitive on purpose. Everything else got more complicated as well, gun leveling, battle pass, attachment unlocks. They want everything as complex as possible so people need to spend more time online doing basic things.

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Somebody send this to TeamNinja.

Probably not much. UX is undersold in a lot of companies because its not a money maker and doesn’t drive sales. You’d think that a good looking game would, but UX gets left on the back burner a lot compared to graphics or other tangible elements.

Working in UX is an underappreciated job. UX is essentially “making the obvious look easy”, but doesn’t realize how easy it can shift from good to bad

<400ms, rofl. It takes about 45 seconds for my client data to load using Salesforce Lighting. Happens on different computers and at different locations.

It hurts my mind that this has NOT been addressed at my organization where time is extremely important for generating sales.

If nothing else, it's a decent starting point to give you concepts to research. Not perfect, but still useful

Before cell phones you didn't learn that many area codes, though. Because that would be a long distance call so for the most part you just learned the base 7 digits

^(867-5309)

>I find it amazing that some game developers spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing a game (

Makes perfect sense to me.

UX Guy: "Hey Senior Leadership I want to bring in a team of 5-10 UX developers who do nothing but make sure the menus are good. "
Leadership: "how about I hire 5-10 engine developers to make the game not run like ass instead?"

People don't want to believe stuff like this but its incredibly well studied and true.

But people really want to believe that they can stare at a billion things at once like they're watching the code of the matrix and then Big Brain shit.

So, they talk about laws of user experience and design, yet have gigantic-ass fonts that make the site barely-usable on desktop. Seems like this site was designed with only mobile use in mind, as that seems like it's formatted a little better (though, still not great). A great example of poor UX/UI execution.

I have a poster of these framed on my office wall. Lead UX consultant.

I mean it's not wrong - a progress bar makes users more likely to "tolerate" an unknown wait time (vs. just thinking the site/app is frozen and closing it). And perfect accuracy isn't really necessary as long as it visibly updates often enough.

But yes, it is evil and manipulative to use a fake progress bar that's not even attempting to show real progress. Just use an animated spinner, and make sure the spinner animation is linked to some kind of occasional "are we still doing meaningful work here" check.

Plot Twist: There are no rules, much less anyone following them.

Needs larger font size.

All modern UI developers should. I'm not sure what the hell happened over the last few years but holy shit user interfaces are becoming so useless everywhere

I immediately thought of the OG How is babby formed? How girl get pragnent? See !

• Brings in 5-10 engine devs
• pushes unrealistic deadlines, workloads, and expectations on them
• game runs like ass anyway

~~AAA Games~~

For PowerPoint, Guy Kawasaki recommends the minimum font size equals the age of the oldest person in the audience.

Also because companies doesn't know the difference between UX and UI.

Ugh, user design of this page is horrible which such HUGE logos and text. I actually can't handle reading it. Which is odd for a UX design site.

Who's going to read a site that's design is so bad?

Ah, you're thinking of the lawso'fux.com

Easy mistake.

Sometimes things working is more important then things not working.. sometimes even with angular a small change in UX means a lot of work OR even if it td suppose to be an hour or day of work it ends up being 1-4 weeks and then your breaking other stuff to get this to work. Even when according to documents it should work. Sometimes the issue is that particular version of the code or ide or servers etc that isn’t working and an unknown bug pops up. Etc I’m sure at some point they were like we gotta make this easier but to do that we would be better off waiting months of testing because it means for a small change we need to change everything anyways right? So why not just in 6 months or next warzone update or whatever we will just do it then if we need to go thru the entire code base might as well make a lot of changes. I’m not sure if I’m making sense

Lmao when I saw the title I opened the thread just to comment on this. I don’t work with software or anything but it blows me away how bad it can be in mw2.

Lol, on my s10e it's still too wide, I need to side scroll

> "Hick's Law: The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices."

Is that the bar for having something named after you? Because that seems super-obvious.

>"Subduction's Law: A user's hunger increases with the time since they last ate."

Named law certificate please.

Add a progress bar.

smirks to self smugly

That explains why Netflix zoomed their web ui way the fuck in and wont let you zoom out

Loooooool. Also, I work a little in UX design. I’ve decided the whole field is a crock of shit, and the only thing that matters is, can the user do what they want on the website. Everything should fall from that, and nothing more. None of this like, the user doesn’t even KNOW what they want to do until they see all the OPTIONS we’ve given them. As long as you minimize latency and make the graphics look somewhat standardized, that’s it

I would argue UX for a video game, a 3dimensional world, is completely different than for a website. In a video game, everything is the UX. That’s the entire point. The entire world of the video game is UX

“I spilled my water. This is really bad! I'm being electrocuted. I have to pull the plug before I die. Otherwise, I… I can't leave this room through that exit and meet Jolyne like I'm supposed to. I have something important to tell Jolyne. I got to go. She needs me. No matter what happens, I can't forget that! I have to get out of this room quickly!”

Parkinson's Law - any task will inflate until all of the available time is spent.

Huh, so they explained procrastination. I am going to mull on this for exactly 22 minutes until my next meeting starts.

Is my wife prägnanz?

https://youtu.be/EShUeudtaFg

What are your thoughts on modern design that hides functions behind the faintest of menus? Seems like a minimalist apple thing

Gross

In the UX world these “laws” aren’t named or referred to as such. This guy took existing concepts, like Gestalt design theory, and named them as laws so he can sell his book and related materials.

Calling them laws gives the implication that they should always be followed, but the whole point of UX is that you start with a ton of research to figure out what ideas will apply or not.

Hence why UX Designer is a job.

Pirates of Prägnanz is my favorite musical

That seven is the magic number thing wasn’t much supported since it was first published in the 50s, instead it is more task-dependent https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4486516/

Always important to remember that a lot of laws of anything depend on the situation.

The specific number 7 hasn’t actually been well studied or reinforced; rather, it’s the chunking aspect of Miller’s work that was salient.

This paper talks about how people just accepted the number seven as a given for forty years after Miller published and didn’t explore it further. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4486516/

Proper UX work is grounded in user-centric design, so yes it is all about 'can the user do what they want'.

Understanding that user's journey, their pain points, and what they're trying to achieve is UX. Too many see flashy User Interfaces and assume that's what UX is.

Check out the book which accompanies the website, which appears to include examples. Reasonable for the author not to republish the entire thing online, I think, and helpful for what it is as a website.

Start with 20 years ago when software wasn't absolute trash.

Then increase the resolution on your WORKING SOFTWARE. Make sure everything is consistent.

Fix everything as you go. Any aesthetic choice that breaks a feature must be immediately undone.

Make it as unlike windows 10 or mac as possible.

I'm not using a tablet, i never want a garbage vertical interface. Even on my phone.

This website always annoys me because of this. I've been working in UX for 10 years, most of these rules never get referred to by these names.

Your point about the "laws" is a good one. At the beginning of my career I thought I was like the UX Ranger, there to lay down UX Laws to the uninitiated around me. Took a few years until I realized I needed to shut the fuck up, ask more questions, listen more, and that in general things are always pretty murky and dependent on the specific situation.

Yeah, I'm going to have to disagree with that. UX is essentially understanding human behavior, to argue that it doesn't exist or that we don't need to take it into account when designing interfaces suggests that you have a poor grasp of the subject, rather than the subject being pointless. No offense. You've also worded your opinion rather poorly so it's hard to understand what exactly you mean.

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Ironically, I had to adjust page size/zoom level, which I almost never do, because of how hard it was to navigate and read it.

Adjusted | Vanilla

EDIT: And judging by the comments, majority hates the website design. Oh the irony indeed

Books are vertical interfaces.

Some people want something different from what they think they want, and most would not even consider that what they want and what their subconscious wants are two different things.

You want what you want because you're human and it is largely hardwired, that's why millions are poured into user analysis. If you actually knew what you wanted, Google would pay you 50 bucks to tell them and call it a day.

That's not to say that there isn't ample room for critique on modern design trends, but to reduce it to "it was better in the olden days!", just brings pictures of Abe Simpson. A lot of the interface designs we see these days are a result of studies that show us what works, so there is a lot of improvement. There's just a very low entry to interface design these days, and the internet made us deal with all kinds countless times more than we did before, so we just see a lot more crappy ones as well.

The website is an effort to sell the book, which is available via a link at the top of the page, and promises examples of the principles. Now, I’m just guessin’, but maybe they should have made that link a bit more prominent.

/me cries in mouse and keyboard.

All I see is laws o fux

Really good link I wasn't aware of - sometimes even just knowing the name of the principle is enough to dig in deeper. Thanks OP.

UX in real life is, unfortunately, way more complex than that. In the real world, UX is a constant balance between commercial interests, business strategy, user needs, behaviors and psychology. So, if you work "a little" in UX design, I understand if you aren't aware of that complexity, but there really is much more to it than merely being the user's advocate (although this is one of the most important functions of a UX designer).

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It’s usually considered a User Interface design thing (making the site look nice) versus UX, however it certainly could impact UX

> In a way, it is itself an example of the mistake of form over function.

It wants you to buy a book, not learn from their page.

Simple as

This isn't necessarily true though. For example, it's a lot easier to read text if it's in a fairly narrow column since you don't have to scan horizontally to read it.

The problem with a spinner is that because tons of software doesn't hook it up to a reliable "are we still doing meaningful work here" check users will assume the thing is frozen if the spinner is there for more than a few seconds. That doesn't happen with a progress bar, because it implies progress is actually happening.

I am a dev but want to learn about UX to be a better teammate with our designer. I often butt heads with “function over form” but i know there must be some balance between them that is better serving to pursue.

The other day I did some reading and learned the original quote was “function before form”. Which I thought was a rephrasing but was expounded to mean that first understand the user and what you want to provide them / what they are looking for then build an engaging form around it.

In other words form without function constrains usage. And function without form doesn’t inspire usage. They must both be present. One doesn’t outweigh the other but they serve different purposes, to understand the right form is to define the function.

Did I understand that correctly?

What do you and /u/Blukoi suggest to learn? Any books or courses? General advice or stand out points over your years working? Specifically on the practical and research side.

> Books are vertical interfaces.

Last time I checked, the central mode of user interaction - i.e. turning the page - is almost always strictly horizontal.

I see you don’t work in tech

I definitely agree, though UX is never really associated with this level of interaction. The way the engine responds to your movements through a controller relates directly to your experience. Bad physics would yield unwanted results, thus giving the user a bad experience.

I only work on interfaces, but I’ve always thought I’d be good at “designing” game physics, or at least testing and relaying needed adjustments. It all come down to getting something to work as efficiently as possible, I suppose.

Yes, I think you explained that quite well.

TBH I don't think that UX is that esoteric or difficult to learn. A lot of it is just the mindset of prioritizing the user. There's certainly aspects that are more complex, and the further you get into the "design" aspect, the more creative skill is required. Being familiar with interaction patterns is important. These days design systems have taken over the web so you're probably not going to be designing from zero anyway.

If you're looking to be a good dev partner to your design team I'd try to get more involved in their process. Depends on your specific business obviously. I've spent most of my career in agencies and consultancies so the answer to "why" is frequently "because they wanted it that way".

The central mode of user interaction is reading from top to bottom along a left justified vertical axis. There are specific rules about line width and even word count per line because we experience them as awkward and hard to follow if they approach a rather horizontal orientation.

Ya I work closely with our director of design (we are friends and I’m generally interested). I’m backend but have always had an interest in UX despite being awful at UI.

I’m wondering how to understand the end user better. It’s a relatively niche space and I don’t think it’s feasible to poll them or get extended feedback. Are there any good practices for narrowing down a user mindset in a more generic way?

With my old boss' permission we did an experiment.

We had experienced and inexperienced users complete normal and unusual tasks in both old word and the ribbon.

The data was crazy. It took several minutes more to do normal tasks in the ribbon, and about 30m to an hour to complete obscure tasks. Some tasks were not completed at all. Meanwhile a simple menu yielded results within seconds.

The ribbon is clearly not a good ui.

I AM currious how that experiment would turn out today, after an entire generation has lived with it.

That's a lot of laws for such subjective concepts.