UX Laws

UX honeycomb

Over the course of my HQ induction at my new workplace, we had to go through several workshops in the first 2-3 weeks of 2020. The ones I had on the last day were the ones that captured my attention the most. I may be biased as the workshops were conducted by senior specialists and senior colleagues from my division who had served in HQ for some time and basically know their stuffs pretty well. The most interesting workshop was entitled 'Instructional Design of Digital Learning Resources' and that was where I picked up several insights on User Experience (UX) which I hope you would takeaway by the end of this blog post.

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Earlier in the day, we were reminded of the ICT Masterplan 4 and how there were 2 main enablers. Teachers as designers of learning experiences and environments and School leaders as culture builders. When the last workshop began after lunch, I was mostly mentally exhausted (read: plus food coma) from the (lunch,) activities and discussions from the workshop before lunch on 'Designing Active Learning with Technology'. Luckily, we had an energiser called '1,2,3...Clap,Snap, Stomp' which perked me up a little. We then watched a pretty cool interactive video by Deloitte which hinted to us the need to find ways to engage our target users while embracing the use of technology and it need not only be through Youtube videos.

The teaser activity that got us to appreciate the importance of good instructions was one that required us to explain - off our memory - how to fold a paper product (think: origami) with written instructions (only texts, no pictures) without attempting to fold it ourselves. It was definitely not easy and we were tempted to refer online. My table partner gave me clear enough instructions to fold a boat while I think I did a decent job in getting my colleague to follow my instructions to fold an A7 8-pages paper book.
However, upon reflection we knew that drawing pictures or recording a video of someone folding it would be more helpful to others. Over the course of the workshop, we learnt 'just enough' strategies to make the instructions more effective, nicer, and real (essentially  better). 

The fancy terms which caught my eye were the ones that fell under the category of UX Laws which I will include below. I hope to be more mindful of these as I continue to design learning experiences and explore object media creation as a side project.

1. Fitts' Law - the time to a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
2. Hick's Law - the time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.
3. Jakob's Law - 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.
4. Miller's Law - The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory.
5. Tesler's Law, aka The Law of Conservation of Complexity, states that for any system there is a certain amount of complexity which cannot be reduced.                   (+ Bonus 4 Effects) 
6. 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.
7. Zerigarnik Effect - People remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.    
8. Serial Position Effect - Users have a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a series.
9. Aesthetic- Usability Effect - Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design  as design that;s more usable. (+ 1 Principle)
10. Pareto Principle - Roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. (by Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist)

I really wonder who came up with those 'Laws' and what inspired them. That may require greater research on my part. Do note that these laws are not actually "laws" which could get you in prison but I suppose they are those that could make you jobless if you choose to ignore them completely. The above is not an exhaustive list of design principles rooted in psychology but I must agree that they will be useful to keep in mind when designing learning experiences or environments. Let's see if the next media object that I create would have improved UX features...