Laws of UX are a collection of design heuristics created by Jon Yablonski to help designers leverage psychology to create more human-centered experiences. You can find explanations for each law on the website lawsofux.com, as well as an in-depth case study regarding his thought process on his website, jonyablonski.com

This will be a series of blog posts briefly covering the many laws and how they can help designers create better experiences for law firms.

1) Miller’s Law

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

Milller’s Law is named after George Miller, a cognitive psychologist who believed that the average number of objects the average human can hold in working memory is seven (plus or minus two).

Miller’s law suggest we use “chunking” in order to organize content in a way that will help users process and understand content easily. Chunking, meaning short “chunks” of information that users can read and scan quickly.

If your website consists of massive walls of content, it might be worth rewriting into grouped, shorter content that is easier to consume. Here are some guidelines to follow that will help you follow Miller’s Law and create content that is easier for your users to consume.

1. Use bullet-points and easy to read headings.
2. Try to keep text lines around 50-75 characters.
3. Use clear visual hiarchy and group related items together

2) Peak-End Rule

“People judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak and at its end, rather than the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.”

Think back to a particular memory. It could be your first concert, a holiday from your childhood or a family vacation. The memory that you recall is created from how you felt during its peak moments and how it ended. This is because users focus on the most intense points of an experience and the final moments.

This is important when thinking about your firm. Whether it’s your website, your intake or how you conduct yourself with your clients, people will only recall the most intense points and the final moments that they experienced with you. It is also important to point out that people recall negative experiences more instensly than positive ones.

Focus on the moments that your service has been the most helpful, or areas where you feel you excel the most and make them better.

3) Serial Position Effect

“Users have a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a series.”

The Serial Position Effect describes how the position of an item in a sequence affects how users recall them. You can find this being put to work in many website navigations. The items within the navigation that are most important are almost always on the far left and the far right (home being far left and contact being far right). This isn’t always the case, especially when designers feel the need to remove the navigation on desktop and opt for a hamburger menu (hint: don’t do that).

In order to minimize strain for your users, try to limit the number of options you have in your navigation, practice area cards, etc. In most cases, more is not necessarily better.

Laws of UX are a collection of design heuristics created by Jon Yablonski to help designers leverage psychology to create more human-centered experiences. You can find explanations for each law on the website lawsofux.com, as well as an in-depth case study regarding his thought process on his website, jonyablonski.com

This will be a series of blog posts briefly covering the many laws and how they can help designers create better experiences for law firms.

1) Law of Proximity

“Objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together.”

The Law of Proximity defines how the human eyes with how our eye and brain form connections with visual elements. Elements that are close together are perceived as a group and related to each other. Elements that have space between them establish a disconnect and are not related.

For example, paragraphs in a book or blog post follow the Law of Proximity by grouping specific sections of text together to form similar ideas. Also, take our contact form in our footer for example. By placing the contact information and form fields within the boundary of a box,  we have established that everything within that element is related to each other and focuses on one specific function.

2) Law of Similarity

“The human eye tends to perceive similar elements in a design as a complete picture, shape, or group, even if those elements are separated.”

The Law of Similarity is similar (heh heh) to the Law of Proximity. While the Law of Proximity states that elements that are close together are perceived as a unified group, the Law of Similarity states that elements that are similar to each other are perceived as a unified group, even if they are not grouped together. Similarity can be defined as shape, color, size, orientation, etc.

3) Law of Uniform Connectedness

“Elements that are visually connected are perceived as more related than elements with no connection.”

The Law of Uniform Connectedness states that elements connected by uniform visual properties are perceived as a unified group more than elements that are not connected. Similar to the Law of Proximity, if a group of identical circles is enclosed in a box OR connected by a line, they are more closely related than the other circles that are outside of the box or not connected by a line.

Stay tuned for the next post in this series where I go over Miller’s Law, Peak-End Rule, and the Serial Position Effect.