UX Laws

Twenty heuristics from cognitive psychology and interaction design. They are not style rules. Each one predicts a measurable behaviour — how long a click takes, how many options cause paralysis, what a user remembers afterwards.

The full set, with the design move and the check for each, is in references/laws.md. Read that file before applying this skill. Do not work from memory of the names.

How to use it

Designing. Pick the three or four laws that govern the screen's job before writing markup. A form is Hick's + Miller's + Tesler's. A landing page is Von Restorff + serial position + Pareto. A dashboard is proximity + similarity

• uniform connectedness. Naming them first stops the design from becoming a pile of preferences.

Reviewing. Walk the checklist in references/laws.md and report only violations, each as: the law, what breaks, the specific fix. No score, no grade, no praise for what already works.

The rules that make it useful

• Cite the law when you invoke it. "Cut this to five options (Hick's law)" is a reviewable claim. "This feels cluttered" is not.
• Laws collide, and the collision is the design decision. Tesler's law says complexity must live somewhere; Hick's law says not in front of the user. Resolving that trade-off explicitly is the work — say which one you chose and why.
• Designing: never more than four laws for one screen. Twenty applied at once is the same as none applied. Pick the ones that govern the screen's job and let the rest go.
• Reviewing: no cap. Report every violation you find. A cap here would mean withholding a real defect to hit a number, which is the rule failing rather than the screen passing. Order the findings by fix cost against impact — one-line fixes first, structural ones last — so the list can be worked top-down and stopped anywhere.
• A law is not a reason to add. Most of the twenty argue for removal. If you are using one to justify a new element, check that you have read it right.