Design concepts

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23Explained · every one with checked sources

Progressive Disclosure
A design principle: show only the few options most people need first, and keep advanced or rarely used ones behind an explicit request such as an Advanced button.
Tesler's Law
Tesler's Law states that every application has an irreducible amount of complexity, so design can only choose whether the user, the application developer, or the platform developer deals with it.
Hick's Law
Hick's Law is the finding that choice reaction time grows with the logarithm of the number of equally likely options, not in proportion to their count.
Fitts's Law
Fitts's Law predicts that the time to move a pointer to a target rises with the distance to it and falls with the target's size.
Heuristic Evaluation
Heuristic evaluation is a usability inspection method in which trained evaluators independently check an interface against ten established usability principles.
Information Architecture
Information architecture is the underlying structure of how a product's content is grouped, labeled, navigated, and searched.
Design System
The maintained set of standards, components and code a team uses to design and build a product consistently at scale.
Jakob's Law
Jakob's Law says people expect a new product to work like the other products they already use, because most of their experience comes from elsewhere.
Doherty Threshold
Walter Doherty and Ahrvind Thadhani's 1982 finding that cutting a computer's response time below about a second raises how much work a person finishes per hour more than proportionally.
Discoverability
Discoverability is how easily a person can work out which actions are possible, and where and how to perform them, from the design alone.
Gulf of Execution
The gulf of execution is the gap between what a person wants to do and the actions a system gives them to do it.
Choice Architecture
The design of the setting in which people choose, where the order, grouping, defaults and wording of the options change what gets chosen even though the options themselves stay the same.
Leading
Leading is the vertical space between lines of text, named after the lead strips printers set between lines of metal type, and it controls how dense and readable a paragraph feels.
F-Pattern
The F-pattern is the tendency of eyes to scan text-heavy web pages with little formatting in an F shape: across the top, across a shorter line lower down, then down the left edge.
Information Scent
Information scent is a person's estimate of how likely a link or label is to lead to what they are looking for, made before they click.
Default Effect
The tendency to keep whichever option is pre-selected instead of choosing another, so the same choice ends up different depending on the default.
Aesthetic-Usability
The tendency of people to judge an attractive interface as easier to use than an unattractive one, even when both work equally well.
Conceptual Models
A conceptual model is the picture of how a system works, in terms of its objects, actions and rules, that a designer builds into a product for users to learn.
Signifiers
A signifier is a perceivable cue, such as a handle or an underline, that tells people what action is possible and where to take it.
Affordance
An affordance is an action that an object or environment makes possible for a particular person or animal, whether or not they notice it.
Visual Hierarchy
Visual hierarchy is the arrangement of design elements so the eye meets them in the order of their intended importance, using contrast, size and grouping.
Figure-Ground
Figure-ground is the Gestalt principle that a scene splits into a figure the eye focuses on and a ground it sits against, decided by cues like contrast, size, and shape.
Closure
Closure is the Gestalt principle that people perceive an incomplete shape as a complete one, so small gaps in an outline do not break recognition.

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