The Laws of Design: From
Principle to Practice
Patrick Haney

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cc_chapman/1361197165

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Design principles are
universal

“Like all man-made
‘laws’ they do not exist
in the absolute sense - to
break them is no sin.”
John Maeda,
on his Laws of Simplicity

Fitt’s Law
The time required to move to a target is a
function of the target size and distance to
target

Make clickable areas
BIGGER

Hick’s Law
The time it takes to make a decision
increases as the number of alternatives
increase

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oobrien/7597395/

Design for error.
Donald Norman,
Seven Principles for Transforming
Difficult Tasks into Simple Ones

Affordance
A property in which the physical
characteristics of an object or
environment influence its function

Chunking
or The Magic Number 7

Organization makes a system
of many appear fewer.
#2: Laws of Simplicity,
John Maeda

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(703) 555-9682

Closure
No, we’re not finished yet.

“Suggest” the box.
Dan Cederholm

Signal-to-Noise Ratio
The ratio of relevant to irrelevant
information in a display

“There is no such thing as
information overload, only
bad design.”
Edward Tufte

Color
More than just a way to make your design
“pretty”

Legibility
The visual clarity of text, generally based
on the size, typeface, contrast, text block,
and spacing of the characters used

Accessibility
Objects and environments should be
designed to be usable, without
modification, by as many people as
possible

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Iteration
A process of repeating a set of operations
until a specific result is achieved

“Good Designers Redesign,
Great Designers Realign”
Cameron Moll

Questions?

Thank You.
http://patrickhaney.com