The Laws of Design: From Principle To Practice

The Laws of Design: From Principle to Practice Patrick Haney

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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

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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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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

by Patrick Haney