There are certain UX Laws which can help you to create a better user experience. Below you will find some of the most important UX Laws that you can apply to your next design project.

Resource:

Home | Laws of UX

Fitts’s law

The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.

Fitts’s Law was established as a model for understanding human movement in the physical world before the invention of the graphic user interface, but it can also be applied to movement through a digital interface.

Origin

In 1954, psychologist Paul Fitts, examining the human motor system, showed that the time required to move to a target depends on the distance to it, yet relates inversely to its size.

About Fitts’s Law:

It is particularly important when designing buttons and other clickable on-screen elements. Fitts’s Law is a very appropriate principle to begin with because it’s fundamental to good user experiences and illustrates how neglecting this can lead to life-threatening situations.

The Key Takeaways

• The target area should be large enough for users to both discern what it is and to accurately select them.
• Buttons should have sufficient spacing between each other.
• Placing similarly used functions or features together allows them to be easily acquired.

Jakob’s law

Users spend most of their time on other sites, and they prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

Origin

Jakob’s Law was coined by Jakob Nielsen, a User Advocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group which he co-founded with Dr. Donald A. Norman (former VP of research at Apple Computer).

About Jakob’s Law

The less mental energy users spend on learning an interface, the more they can dedicate towards achieving their objective. While designing the interface we can follow the common design patterns and conventions in strategic areas such as page structure, workflows, navigation, and placement of expected elements such as search.

The Key Takeaways

• Users expect that familiar products to another will appear similar.
• Good user experiences are made possible when the designer’s mental model is aligned with the user’s mental model.
• By leveraging existing mental models, we can create high-level user experiences in which the user can focus on their task rather than learning new models.

Hick’s Law

The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices available.

Origin

Hick’s Law was formulated by psychologists William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman in 1952 after examining the relationship between the number of stimuli present and an individual’s reaction time to any given stimulus.

About Hick’s law

When users bombarded with choices they will take time to interpret and decide. Choices seem to be good but when response time is critical keep the choices to a minimum. It will speed up the decision making.

Note: Hick’s Law can apply when designing Control display, Dropdown menus, Contact pages, Sign up forms, Button selection, and Navigation menus. Hick’s Law does not apply to complex decision making. If decisions are requiring extensive reading, researching, or extended deliberation. Hick’s Law won’t be able to predict the time to make a decision.

The Key Takeaways

• Avoid providing too many choices, it will increase the cognitive load for users.
• Break down the long or complex processes into screens with fewer options.
• Use progressive onboarding to minimize cognitive load for new users.

Miller’s Law

The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory.

Origin

Miller’s Law originates from a paper published in 1956 by cognitive psychologist George Miller title “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information”.

About Miller’s Law

The human mind can remember ~7 bits of information when completing a task that requires cognitive effort. This is critical because humans are constantly performing tasks, and trying to juggle various stimuli in the mind when doing so. One of the key concepts behind Miller’s Law is ‘chunking’, which basically means assembling various bits of information into a cohesive gestalt.

The Key Takeaways

• Don’t use the “magical number seven” to justify unnecessary design limitations.
• Organize content into smaller chunks to help users process, understand, and memorize easily.
• Remember that the short-term memory capacity will vary per individual.

Tesler’s Law

Tesler’s Law, also known as The Law of Conservation of Complexity, states that for any system there is a certain amount of complexity which cannot be reduced.

Origin

The origins of Tesler’s Law can be traced back to the mid-1980s at the seminal Xerox PARC. It was during this time that computer scientist Larry Tesler was helping to develop some of the foundational language that would become known as interaction design and was a key to the development of the desktop and desktop publishing.

About Tesler’s Law

Every UX designer would like to simplify processes and make them faster, but we have to take into account that there are things that cannot be simplified to be more basic. In this case, we transferred it from one place to another. The result of this transfer is that complexity finds its way into the user interface.

The Key Takeaways

• All processes have a core of complexity that cannot be designed away, and therefore must be assumed by either the system or the user.
• Ensure the burden of complexity is shared by identifying appropriate places to move inherent complexity.

Resource:

Home | Laws of UX

Laws of UX and examples was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Figma is a web-based design tool with real-time collaboration. But is Figma only used for UI design? or Prototype? what if we use it for creating illustrations. I started exploring Figma by creating simple, flat, minimal illustration and many more.

Getting started

It all started when I was traveling to another city leaving behind my laptop, thinking of enjoying my holiday without any fear of work. In the middle of the trip, I got a call from my sister as she needed my help in some illustrations for her college event. I totally perturbed on what to do next, because for making the illustrations I used to work in Adobe illustrator only. I was stuck since I neither have the laptop nor software at that time. So I borrowed one that has the basic configuration and started looking for online design tools. It was that time when I stumbled upon Figma and from that very day, I never looked back. So I decided to take up the challenge of creating at least 30 illustrations in Figma in order to explore this tool.

Creative Process

Figma is an amazing tool, with the use of basic shapes and the right techniques we can create some good illustrations. It provides easy manipulation and is quite smooth and fast.

For Illustrations, I broke my creative process down into three steps:-

Step 01|Look for Inspiration: Design Inspiration is around every corner of life. Once I start picking up on those little details, it’s easy to translate them into whatever I’m working on. Most of my artwork is a mixture of real-life inspiration and creative ideas available on Pinterest, Dribbble, Behance, etc.

“Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent.” — Jim Jarmusch

Step 02|Sketch Ideas: After collecting the ideas for artwork, I broke the composition into basic shapes and then drew it with a pencil tool. Once you get familiar with making a real-life object with basic shapes instead of using the pencil tool, you will be able to make the more complicated illustration.

Step 03|Create Illustrations: I started with minimal artwork and later on, I added texture, patterns and blending mode. I never thought of the capability of Figma for illustration, but I give it a try and came up with the following amazing stuff!

I started with minimal illustrations. These are composed of the pen tool and line art. Trying the tools with these illustrations was making me more proficient with the software. Since I am a big fan of colors so I created the color palette for my next illustrations to be made. To become more prominent I tried exploring more editing tools and really enjoying the process, below is another set of artworks.

These illustrations are created with basic shapes and edit tool, we can use edit object to manipulate the node according to requirement. Multiple Selection tool was also a great way of cutting shapes and create a new shape. We can also create patterns and use them as pattern fill.

After understanding the patterns, I tried my hands on Folk art which turned out quite well. I played with abstract patterns and line art, and then came up with the following artworks.

Benefits of the challenge

• No more dependency on a single tool for creating the illustration.
• When it comes to challenging myself, I have a more disciplined routine.
• Enjoy learning new possibilities and Measure my growth.

I hope from the next time you also explore Figma for creating illustrations.

This is my first article, I just started to get into writing so I’m sorry about any typos whatsoever. Thank you for reading ☺

Special thanks to Kanika Sharma for her help with this article.

*Note: Illustration reference is taken from Pinterest, Dribbble, Behance, etc.

30 illustrations challenge in Figma was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.