The Laws of UX were set out to help designers understand the psychology of interactive design and make these concepts more accessible. I’ve been really interested in the psychology of design so this really caught my attention. I’m going to look at the laws most prevalent to this project to get a better understanding which will allow me to utilise them.
“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.”
Understanding Jakob's law has made me confident in my designs for the music app project, as it’s made me comfortable with the idea of not reinventing the wheel. I felt pressure at the start of the project to be as unique as possible, but really certain types of the screen have a universal expectation of the design. While it doesn’t mean you should remove any uniqueness, it does mean you should focus the uniqueness on areas that don’t generally have a standard layout.
“The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.”
Fitt’s Law is basically showing that touch targets should be evenly spaced and correctly sized. It’s definitely something I need to keep in mind when building my music app UI, especially as my app revolves around customisation so it will have a lot of settings with touch targets.
“Objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together”
This is an important law for me to utilise in my music app as I want the app to largely use images to convey information and options, so correctly grouping these objects will make for a more efficient experience.
“Increasing the number of choices will increase the decision time logarithmically.”
Hick’s Law means that users will take longer to choose when they have more choices. As my music app is going to be about customisation, there are going to be a lot of choices for the users, but I want to make sure I allow a select amount of options, rather than overcomplicating it with loads of options. Understanding this law has helped me realise I need to find a balance between the number of customisation options I give users.