DesignerTom’s 6-point UX psychology

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:

1. What does institutional knowledge say?

2. What products are your customers familiar with?
3. What do your customers (and their behaviors in your product) tell you?

When making decisions, we build our context linearly. Start with 1 and in the absence of
3, fallback on 2, and so on.

There is an overwhelming amount of psychology to consider when designing user

interfaces.

Here are my 6 most-used psychology fallbacks over the last 13 years:

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:

● Identify the most common products used by your customers

● Teardowns of competitors who have a foothold on marketshare
● Teardowns of popular products and operating systems

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

Your customers adapt better to smaller, incremental changes.

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.

This is my most-used principle because its a solution to the previous 4 considerations.

Customers only need enough context to discover that more information is available
when they need it. Practical examples include:

● 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

Your customers will better retain grouped information.

Chunking is grouping individual pieces of information into a meaningful whole. It's

useful because it bypasses the limited working memory identified by Miller's Law.
Practical examples include:

● Provide pre-defined filters for large datasets

● Group your product navigation into 4-5 top-level categories
● Separate complex workflows into logical steps

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.