Previously, I’ve published my Laws od UX article and you liked it a lot so I decided to make another one with some more laws of design that you’ll love to read, so let’s get straight into them.

For those who didn’t check out the first part click the link down below.

1. Parkinson’s Law

Any task will inflate until all of the available time is spent.

For instance, you’ll observe that deadlines have a dramatic effect on the speed with which you produce your work. Given a week’s notice, you’ll spend at least half of that time writing that 1,000-word essay. You use the time to do extensive research and then meticulously edit your work. In my experience, a long time is also used to get inspiration before you get down to the actual writing.

On the other hand, your approach changes dramatically when you have a one-day deadline. You obtain just a few facts from research, understand the style guidelines and simply write what you know. Later on, you edit for grammatical errors and make sure there are no typos. It’s likely that it’s a less polished product than the others, but it’s viable.

“We should be careful not to exhaust our available time on things that are merely good and leave little time for that which is better or best.” — Dallin Oaks

The deadline is a constraint on time. You can apply constraints on other areas of your life to become more effective too. With such constraints, you have to sift out the essential from the optional.

• Spending too much? Save half of what’s left from your bills. You’ll still be happy without spending the same amount on luxuries. You’re forced to prioritize what truly makes you happy instead of spending frivolously.
• Buying too many clothes? Make sure everything can fit into your wardrobe. If one new item comes in, another has to go. There’s no unnecessary clutter.
• Eating too much? Have smaller portions or use smaller containers. You become more aware of your progress when you end up eating 10 mini packs of chips as opposed to a family pack.

Takeaways

1. Limit the time it takes to complete a task to what users expect it’ll take.
2. Reducing the actual duration to complete a task from the expected duration will improve the overall user experience.

2. Pareto Principle

The Pareto principle states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

In the 19th century, the Italian economist and engineer Vilfredo Pareto noticed that 80% of the peas from his garden came from just 20% of the peapods. When he began studying land ownership and wealth inequality, he again noticed that 80% of Italy’s land was owned by only 20% of its people. In the 20th century, management consultant Joseph Juran rediscovered Pareto’s work and popularized it as the Pareto principle to prioritize investing valuable effort on the “vital few” instead of the “trivial many.”

A surprisingly wide range of contexts have demonstrated this 80/20 imbalance:

• 20% of websites capture 80% of web traffic.
• 20% of customers generate 80% of a company’s revenue.
• 20% of academic papers make up 80% of all citations.
• 20% of software bugs contribute to 80% of computer crashes.
• 20% of possible openings are used in 80% of chess games.

The Pareto principle is a statistical power law describing a particular Pareto distribution, a distribution closely related to Zipf curves. In basic terms, a power law describes a mathematical relationship between 2 variables: one variable is proportional to the other variable raised to a certain power. Examples include y = x2, y = 5x3, or y = 2.5 x-5. A small increase in x leads to a substantial change in y.

The Pareto principle doesn’t predict when this phenomenon happens, nor does it explain why it happens. Also, there’s no guarantee your data will neatly follow an 80/20 distribution. For instance, 5% of your web pages may be responsible for 67% of all page views and, in many social media, 1% of users account for 90% of postings. What’s important is the magnitude of the imbalance between the 2 values and not their exact numbers. Think of the Pareto principle as a helpful observation that inputs and outputs are often not evenly distributed. A large group may contain only a few meaningful contributors to the desired outcome.

Takeaways

1. Inputs and outputs are often not evenly distributed.
2. A large group may contain only a few meaningful contributors to the desired outcome.
3. Focus the majority of the effort on the areas that will bring the largest benefits to the most users.

3. Postel’s Law

Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.

Postel’s Law (also known as the Robustness Principle) was formulated by Jon Postel, an early pioneer of the Internet. The Law is a design guideline for software, specifically in regards to TCP and networks, and states “TCP implementations should follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others”. In other words, programs that send messages to other machines (or to other programs on the same machine) should conform completely to the specifications, but programs that receive messages should accept non-conformant input as long as the meaning is clear.

Takeaways

1. Be empathetic to, flexible about, and tolerant of any of the various actions the user could take or any input they might provide.
2. Anticipate virtually anything in terms of input, access, and capability while providing a reliable and accessible interface.
3. The more we can anticipate and plan for in design, the more resilient the design will be.
4. Accept variable input from users, translate that input to meet your requirements, define boundaries for input, and provide clear feedback to the user.

4. 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.

Perhaps you remembered a particularly beautiful view from the top of a mountain after a long hike. Maybe you thought about an interesting exhibit you saw at a museum or a perfect morning on the beach with your family. You might also have pictured the moment when your last trip took a turn for the worse: maybe you thought of losing your passport or falling ill far from home. Whether the memories were happy or miserable, your overall impression of your last vacation likely featured a few particularly strong moments.

We remember experiences in our lives as a series of snapshots rather than a complete catalogue of events. Our minds quickly average the moments that most stand out in our memories to form our opinion of the past. The most emotionally intense points of an experience and the end of that experience are heavily weighted in how we remember an event.

Takeaways

1. Pay close attention to the most intense points and the final moments (the “end”) of the user journey.
2. Identify the moments when your product is most helpful, valuable, or entertaining and design to delight the end user.
3. Remember that people recall negative experiences more vividly than positive ones.

5. Zeigarnik Effect

People remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.

Ever left a thrilling novel right before the great mystery was about to be unfolded?

The Zeigarnik Effect is the tendency to experience intrusive thoughts about an objective that was once pursued and left incomplete.

The automatic system signals the conscious mind, which may be focused on new goals, that a previous activity was left incomplete.

If you start working toward a goal and fail to get there, thoughts about the goal will keep popping into your mind while you are doing other things as if to remind you to get back on track to finish reaching that goal.

Zeigarnik Effect is good method designers use to trick users into making them do certain things they wouldn’t do otherwise. LinkedIn uses this trick to make users complete their profiles.

Takeaways

1. Invite content discovery by providing clear signifiers of additional content.
2. Providing artificial progress towards a goal will help to ensure users are more likely to have the motivation to complete that task.
3. Provide a clear indication of progress in order to motivate users to complete tasks.

I’m not the founder of laws I'm the curator of them, I love to place laws inside one article, and to find the actual sources of those laws and learn about more laws check out the website below. thanks

Source of Inspiration: JON YABLONSKI’s Laws of UX