Laws are something that every citizen of the country should follow to live a happy and free life and In the country of design, every designer should follow the following laws to design a beautiful and useful design that every user love.

The thing is, these laws are not made by govt, they are made by the designers just like you and they find these laws by researching on the users and therefore you’ll love to follow them as you’re the government in this country of design and you’ve right to introduce the new law whenever you find one.

So, Without being so political, let’s jump straight into the laws I always follow and are in my “Need to Follow” list. Yes, I have that list.

#1 Aesthetic-Usability Effect

Do you like beautiful-looking design that works averagely or Do you like ugly-looking design that works perfectly?Many of you might choose the second option because you think logically that “who will choose the design that does not even work” but because humans are not logical, and they are emotional, they go with the beautiful-looking design.

those of you who picked the beautiful looking and average working one, you guys should be proud of that you just acknowledge the first law of UX design which is popularly known as “Aesthetic-Usability Effect” which states that

Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable.

In 1995 Researchers found that if your design is beautiful then many users complain less about the product, they basically forget the bad things and pardon your mistakes because as humans we emotionally perceive beautiful design as attractive, and then we can accept little flaws easily, but..

If you have an ugly-looking design, things turn worse, users like to get frustrated and they tend to complain a lot about the design and product.

Therefore companies tried to appoint designers to make their products look beautiful so that users complain less and wait till the company fixes the problem. Let’s check the key lessons that you can follow as a designer..

Key Lessons

1. An aesthetically pleasing design creates a positive response in people’s brains and leads them to believe the design actually works better.

2. People are more tolerant of minor usability issues when the design of a product or service is aesthetically pleasing.

3. Visually pleasing design can mask usability problems and prevent issues from being discovered during usability testing.

#2 Doherty Threshold Law

One day I was surfing around the web to download the latest Marvel movie, (Disney Plus hasn’t existed at that time) So I think it might get leaked or something because I wanted to watch the Post-Credit scene again and after researching a lot I found the link where I download the movie,

Then I click the Download button (in excitement) but nothing happens when I click it, again and again, nothing happens, but after doing multiple taps the 11 screens pop up. Basically, the pages are processing things in the background but the website didn’t show anything that the process is going.

If you ever encounter this thing no matter how small or big it is, then you’ve known the pain of user, we are emotional and restless. we don't like to wait.

In 1982 Researchers found this behavior in the experiment and named this as a Law after the name of the head researcher Walter J. Doherty i.e. Doherty Threshold Law which states that..

Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace (<400ms) that ensures that neither has to wait on the other.

In Today’s world, we encounter this problem a little because companies around the world now know this law and follow the key points to avoid the situation where users get confused.

Key Lessons

1. Provide system feedback within 400 ms in order to keep users’ attention and increase productivity.
2. Use perceived performance to improve response time and reduce the perception of waiting.
3. Animation is one way to visually engage people while loading or processing is happening in the background.
4. Progress bars help make wait times tolerable, regardless of their accuracy.
5. Purposefully adding a delay to a process can actually increase its perceived value and instill a sense of trust, even when the process itself actually takes much less time.

#3 Fitts’s Law

Do you know, why the buy now button is bigger and than the rest of the buttons on the e-commerce site? It’s just because bigger things grab more attention of the user than the small things and by making the buy button bigger the apps and websites can grab your attention easily and in return, they can earn big revenue without paying for ads.

In 1954, researchers found that the bigger things grab attention and smaller things are left unnoticed, therefore they come up with this law and this become popular and today designers follow this for better design.

Key Points

1. Touch targets should be large enough for users to accurately select them.
2. Touch targets should have ample spacing between them.
3. Touch targets should be placed in areas of an interface that allow them to be easily acquired.

#4 Jakob’s Law

Do you know why all of the websites are similar at the base level, why their logos are on the left, the search bar on the right, the footer on the bottom for all the contact information, or why they use similar rectangular buttons, the answer to that is this law. Jakob's law states that

Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

So by making the things similar the user can easily make the switch and understand your app and software. and if you make that difference the chances are that your user might get confused and may use the competitor's product or services.

Key Lessons

1. Users will transfer expectations they have built around one familiar product to another that appears similar.
2. By leveraging existing mental models, we can create superior user experiences in which the users can focus on their tasks rather than on learning new models.
3. When making changes, minimize discord by empowering users to continue using a familiar version for a limited time.