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Lesson 08

Topic

The Science of Usability: Essential Laws and Heuristics for Better UX and UI Design

Reading Material

"Yablonski, J., 2024. "Laws of UX – Using Psychology to Design Better Products & Services". O`Reilly"

lawsofux.pdf

1) What are the new terms in this text? How are they defined? Where do they come from?

  • Jakob’s Law: users spend most of their time on other sites and prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know. It reminds designers that people leverage previous experience to understand new experiences. The law is attributed to Jakob Nielsen.
  • Aesthetic–Usability Effect: means that users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable. It suggests that beautiful design creates a positive response and can make users more tolerant of minor usability issues. Its origins trace back to a 1995 study by Masaaki Kurosu and Kaori Kashimura at the Hitachi Design Center, corroborated by later research.
  • Tesler’s Law: states that for any system there is a certain amount of complexity that cannot be reduced. This inherent complexity must be handled by either the system (design/development) or the user. Its origins are traced back to Larry Tesler, a computer scientist at Xerox PARC in the mid-1980s.>

2) Who are the authors? Where do they work? Who do they refer to?

  • Jon Yablonski, self described designer, worked with numerous researchers and experts.

3) What questions come to your mind from reading this text?

  • Given that aesthetically pleasing design can sometimes mask usability issues (Aesthetic–Usability Effect), what specific strategies or testing methods can designers use to ensure they uncover genuine usability problems beyond surface appearance?

4) How does it affect your design practice? What applications do you see in your practice?

  • The text will help me a lot in justifying my design choices based on empirical evidence, because i often struggle to describe why some designs work better than others.

Brief Summary of Lesson

The lesson was hosted by Mathan and Viktoriia.
Mathan firstly talked about all the different laws from the book, and gave many helpful and illustrative practical examples. Viktoriia talked about some of the important "effects", like the peak-end rule and the aesthetic-usability effect, which both play an important rule and are important to keep in mind. The end of the presentation was a reminder that "with power comes responsibility", meaning that when some UX is too good (e.g. TikTok), it can be very harmful and addicting aswell.

After the presentation, Jürgen talked about the laws of simplicity by John Maeda, who is a Japanese Inventor/Designer, who was the head of the MIT lab, and is currently at microsoft.
He talked about some laws
1) Reduce
2) Organize
3) Time
4) Learn
5) Differences
6) Context
7) Emotion
8) Trust
9) Failure
10) The one

He then gave us a couple tips:

Material io

  • Remove lines and boxes
  • Pay attention to contrast (at least 4.5:1) -> download Stark to check accessibility
  • Familiarity is good (dont reinvent the wheel, dont reinvent the whole flow etc)
  • Use color weight to establish hierarchy
  • Avoid using more than two typefaces
  • Line lenght (ideally 40-60 characters)
  • Never use right aligned, except for very short typographical sections
  • Colour system -> avoid using bright primary or secondary colors for body text

Takeaways

The biggest takeaway for me were all the practical examples on how and why the different UX laws are applied in the real world. Viktoriia also retroactively provided context for some of our earlier tasks, for example the journey map, which made the task make more sense. Another thing that stuck was that we usually make an opinion during the first 5-7 seconds, which is why UI/UX is so important.