UX Laws & Principles

Decision making

Large or difficult choice sets can reduce decision confidence or action when options are hard to compare and preferences are uncertain.

Decision making

Cognitive bias is an umbrella term for systematic patterns in judgment that can depart from a task-relevant normative standard.

Mental models

People bring expectations learned from other products, so familiar conventions often reduce the effort needed to begin using a new interface.

Decision making

An initial numeric or categorical reference can pull later estimates and judgments toward it, even when adjustment should be larger.

Attention

People can ignore page regions that resemble advertising or other routinely irrelevant content, even when those regions contain useful information.

Decision making

Adding an option that is clearly worse than one target option on relevant attributes can shift preference toward that target.

Decision making

Ownership or a sense of possession can increase the value assigned to an item relative to the value assigned before ownership.

Decision making

In many risky choices, losses relative to a reference point influence value more strongly than comparable gains, with magnitude varying by context.

Mental models

People often stop searching when they encounter an option that meets an acceptable threshold rather than exhaustively finding the theoretical optimum.

Decision making

People may prefer an existing state or previously chosen option beyond what its attributes alone would predict.

Perception

Visual search performance depends on how a target is represented, how similar distractors are, and how attention is guided through the display.