1. Fitts's Law: The time to acquire 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; designing for familiarity can improve the user experience.
4. Law of Prägnanz: People will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images as the simplest form possible.
5. Miller's Law: The average person can only keep seven (plus or minus two) items in their working memory.
6. Occam's Razor: In selecting solutions the one with the fewest assumptions is the best (no more assumptions should be made than are necessary).
7. Law of Proximity: Objects that are in close proximity will be seen as grouped together.
8. Parkinson's Law: Tasks/work expands to use up the amount of time allocated for it.
9. Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule): Roughly 80% of effects come from 20% of causes.
10. Serial Position Effect: People tend to remember the first and last items in a series better than the middle items.
11 Tesler's Law (The Law of Conservation of Complexity): Every application has an inherent amount of irreducible complexity.
12. The Doherty Threshold: A 400-millisecond delay is noticeable and requires the user to stay focused on the task (which is where productivity increases).
13. The Law of Similarity: Elements that are similar in some way, such as colour or shape, are perceived as related.
14. The Von Restorff Effect (Isolation Effect): The odd one out is more likely to be remembered.
15. Zeigarnik Effect: People remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.
16. The Law of Common Region: Elements tend to be perceived into groups if they are sharing an area with a clearly defined boundary.
17. The Law of Uniform Connectedness: Elements that are visually connected are perceived as more related than elements with no connection.
18. Peak-End Rule: People tend to judge their experiences, especially those that involve discomfort or pain, based on the most intense (peak) moment and the way the experience ended (end).
19. Postel’s Law (Robustness Principle): Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.
20. Goal-Gradient Effect: The tendency for people to increase their efforts and motivation as they get closer to a goal or reward.
21. Aesthetic-Usability Effect: People tend to perceive more aesthetically pleasing designs as easier to use and more effective, even if the aesthetic qualities have no direct relationship to the actual functionality of the product or system.
Plus the bonus 'law' - Parkinson's Law of Triviality: People tend to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues - that appears on many lists alongside the 21 laws, guiding UX designers.
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