Interaction
Fitts’s Law
For aimed movement, acquisition time tends to increase with target distance and decrease with target size along the movement axis.
Psychology, behavioral science, perception, human computer interaction, and usability principles explained for working designers.
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Interaction
For aimed movement, acquisition time tends to increase with target distance and decrease with target size along the movement axis.
Interaction
In practiced choice-reaction tasks, response time tends to grow with the information uncertainty of the possible stimulus-response alternatives.
Gestalt
Elements placed nearer one another tend to be perceived as related, especially when the spacing pattern is consistent and other cues do not override it.
Mental models
A mental model is a person’s internal, partial representation of how a system works and what actions will produce.
Memory
Organizing separate items into meaningful, familiar groups can make information easier to perceive, rehearse, and retrieve.
Mental models
People bring expectations learned from other products, so familiar conventions often reduce the effort needed to begin using a new interface.
Gestalt
Ambiguous visual input tends to organize into a stable, coherent form under the conditions present, often favoring relative simplicity or regularity.
Gestalt
Elements sharing visible properties such as shape, color, size, or orientation tend to be perceived as belonging together.
Memory
Immediate-memory performance is limited and can improve through meaningful recoding, but Miller’s ‘seven plus or minus two’ is not a universal UI item limit.
Usability
When explanations or designs account for the same requirements equally well, prefer the one that depends on fewer unnecessary assumptions.
Usability
Make relevant objects, actions, and options visible or readily retrievable so people do not have to recall them unaided.
Memory
Recall often varies by an item’s position in a sequence, with advantages for early and recent items under many test conditions.
Attention
People can ignore page regions that resemble advertising or other routinely irrelevant content, even when those regions contain useful information.
Gestalt
Elements that move or change together tend to be perceived as belonging to the same group.
Mental models
A conceptual model is the designed explanation of a system’s objects, relationships, actions, and state that the interface presents to users.
Memory
Retrieval improves when available cues overlap with information and context encoded during learning.