[gkya]

Gkya's law of usefulness of a web page:

The usefulness of a web page is a function of the multiplication of the number of laws it cites w/o any context whatsoever and the ratio of the lines of text such page contains in a screenful over how many it could've contained.

> The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.

Wat?

> The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.

Certainly. But this is as relevant as general relativity to designing UX: the context is the key. What are you making, for what purpose, when, for whom? In this form in which it's put forth here, this can mean about anything.

> 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.

This is SOOO WRONG. I probably don't spend time on those sites because I'm in love with their UI, most of the time I'm fighting it with uBlock and patience. Many people are in prisons, that doesn't mean they like it.

> People will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images as the simplest form possible, because it is the interpretation that requires the least cognitive effort of us.

Again, this means nothing. It's like, "stones are hard". Alright then, what am I supposed to do? Sand them? Hit my head on them? Throw them at passers-by?

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

Alright...

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

Yeah...

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

Oh, thanks...

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

This is kind of immediately useful, but it's also neat that this rule is ignored in making this fancy bulleted list.

> Tesler's Law, also known as The Law of Conservation of Complexity, states that for any system there is a certain amount of complexity which cannot be reduced.

Agree.

> The Von Restorff effect, also known as The Isolation Effect, predicts that when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered.

Certainly true.

This web page is a good demonstration of bad UX: there certainly are some stuff there that could be useful, but no indication of how that can be possible is made, no explanation of what is before the eyes of the reader is there, the only means of interpretation provided to the reader is intuition, illegiblity is swiftly achieved by using black font on a nearly-black background, the viewport is used with absolutely no care to efficiency, and there is a menu that requires JavaScript to operate. This is like a parody of a page on UX laws.

Put information on your web pages, people.

[zzzcpan]

> This is SOOO WRONG.

Even if the author is not a UX person himself and doesn't understand those things well enough to give better explanations, this is still not wrong. Users spend most of the time not on your website, but on other websites. This is important, because it means that other websites shape what users know and understand about websites' UIs, not your website and that users are not willing to spend time learning your website's UI. So you have to learn how other websites do it and apply the same concepts in order to make it easy for people to use your website.

[wingerlang]

> The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.

If you need to move the cursor far and to a small target, it will take a long time to hone in on it.

The shorter you have to move it, and the larger the target - the easier it is to click.

For example the menu on macOS is always at the top of the screen, making its target HUGE and is therefore basically O(1) to hit.

[alxlaz]

What (I believe) gkya was trying to point out is that "the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target" is a rather pointless statement. Of course it's a function of the distance to and size of a target; but Fitts' law consists not in this observation (which was nothing new to Fitts himself, and most likely to the entire human race ever since the first Paleolithic man tried to throw a stone at something), but in the actual function, ID = log(2D/W).

The cargo-cult reading of Fitts' work which is so prevalent nowadays probably accounts for many of the instances of cargo-cult UX design that are so popular today.

[gkya]

I don't really know Fitts' work, but I do understand that what that sentence means is obviously "smaller things are harder to click or tap". But that is very obvious and thus meaningless without indicating what that implies: e.g. "make bigger buttons".

[alxlaz]

OK, first, that sentence does not mean "smaller things are harder to click or tap". That sentence would still hold true if smaller things were easier to click or tap. Besides, in 1954, when Fitts' paper appeared, it was already understood that this was the case.

I'm not being overly pedantic here -- Archimedes' principle is not that "whether an object sinks or floats depends on what it's made of", that had been known since the dawn of time. Archimedes' contribution was to give it a quantitative formulation, which is what we now call Archimedes' principle -- the force is equal to the weight of the volume of liquid that the immersed object displaces. Similarly, Fitts' law is not that larger targets are easier to hit, that has been understood forever; it's quantifying this statement, and the end result is what we now know as Fitts' law.

Second, the implication "make bigger buttons" is not at all valid in every circumstance -- which is why I warmly suggest reading the actual paper to anyone who cites it.

Fitts' work applies to repetitive movements of equal amplitude and speed, not necessarily made with active cognitive involvement, and assumes that targets are known in advance and -- although not explicitly stated, but implicit in the experiment -- easily distinguishable. It will tell you nothing useful about the size of buttons in dialog boxes, for example. (Edit:) this blind interpretation would also suggest, for example, that making the macOS menu thicker would help, but it doesn't; or that simply making buttons thin, but placing them on top of the screen, would also help -- which holds is only partially true for mouse-driven interfaces, and not at all for touch interfaces.

[gkya]

I'm not really interested in these details, and "make bigger buttons" was just an example of what an implication might have been (as indicated by "e.g."). What I tried to criticise was the vagueness of the linked page and the scarcity of information.

[alxlaz]

> What I tried to criticise was the vagueness of the linked page and the scarcity of information.

So if you are not interested in "these details", but you found the page vague and the information scarce, what details should it have included so as not to be vague?

[rmrfrmrf]

Or space them out more. Of course these concepts seem trivial when you implicitly shave off half the content and then fit it to your own pre-conceived solutions.

[rmrfrmrf]

I tried to upvote you, but hit the downvote button instead :(. Oh well.

[seanmcdirmid]

HN is not Fitts’ law compliant.

[gkya]

It's not that I don't understand this. It's that a web page on "the laws of UX" counts on the readers' interpretative capabilites to get such point across, and excludes any concrete example to make their point clear.

[elcapitan]

Unless you use a very large screen, in that case you often have to move the mouse over half the desk any time you want to click the menu. I remember the fun I had back when Apple produced those 30" screens.

[seanmcdirmid]

For touch that is true, for mouse and pen you still have to consider travel time.

[wingerlang]

That's the distance

[seanmcdirmid]

Yes (but for touch on a phone or tablet, being on the edge of the screen is better because your hands are already resting near there + occlusion sucks).