271: Principles of Design
Design Details
The Law of Consciousness
Between five and nine things can be held in a human's brain ram without them forgetting anything. This is why phone numbers are split up, even though they're seven digits. And you should also do it so that people can remember those choices and easily parse through them because of Miller's Law. So if you're going to be showing a list of choices, you should keep it small for the Hixlot thing.
This week, we dive deep on several design principles that will help you make better decisions when creating interfaces and interactions. In Follow-up, we discuss the etiquette of responding to recruiter emails, and in News, we cover Twitter's latest exploration into presence and status. And as always, we share a couple cool things, including an innovative basketball shoe and an updated personal site.
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Follow-up:
- Here's Morgan Knutson’s tweetstorm again, for reference
News:
- MG Seigler tweeted: "As redundant as it may sound at first, I love the Twitter “status” idea. A throwback to OG Twitter too! (Still don’t love the idea of presence though.)"
- Article: "Twitter tests new profile features, including presence indicators and ‘ice breakers’"
- Site: Spec.fm now has a "global player" that continues playing as you browse
Listener Question:
- Dmitry Veremchuk (@d_ver on Twitter) asks: "Is there a limit to number of the side projects one takes on? Because personally, I am interested in animation, video editing, illustration, programming, photography, and many more things. Starting projects in all of these fields would be daunting and of a low quality."
Discussion:
- Site: Jon Yablonski collected these Laws of UX
- Fitts' Law: "The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target."
- Article: Luke Wroblewski wrote "Designing for Large Screen Smartphones"
- Material Design: Floating Action Button
- FABs in Material Design 2.0 can be centered for better reachability
- Action sheets in Apple's Human Interface Guidelines
- Jakob's Law: "Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know."
- Loren Brichter introduced pull-to-refresh in Tweetie
- Video: "Loren Brichter on Tweetie"
- Apple uses scroll-jacking on their Mojave site
- Bock's Law: "Most people don't have the newest shit."
- Note: The "grandparent phone" Marshall was thinking of is called Jitterbug
- Wenni's Principle: "Don't move tap targets."
- The Doherty Threshold: "Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace (<400ms) that ensures that neither has to wait on the other."
- Article: "Improved Perceived Performance with Skeleton Screens"
- Hick's Law: "The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices."
- Video: "The paradox of choice | Barry Schwartz"
- Book: "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman
- "Faster Horses" is a quote by Henry Ford
- Miller's Law: "The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory."
- Gestalt Grouping
- Law of Common Region: "Elements tend to be perceived into groups if they are sharing an area with a clearly defined boundary."
- Law of Proximity: "Objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together."
- Law of Similarity: "The human eye tends to perceive similar elements in a design as a complete picture, shape, or group, even if those elements are separated."
- Image: iOS Settings
- GIF: Emergency Alert System
- Image: Don't Dead Open Inside
- r/dontdeadopeninside
- Affordance: "the qualities or properties of an object that define its possible uses or make clear how it can or should be used"
- Book: "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman
- Article: "Norman Doors: Don’t Know Whether to Push or Pull? Blame Design."
- Video: "It's not you. Bad doors are everywhere."
- Article: "Affordances and Signifiers in Mobile Interface Design"
- GIF: Apple Music's Now Playing sheet
- Image: Confusing segmented controller (Which one is selected?)
- Did we miss your favorite law, rule, or principle? Do have one of your own principles? Let us know on Twitter :) or Spectrum
One Cool Thing:
- Marshall shared the new Air Jordan XXXIII
- Note: Marshall mistakenly called it the "Flight System," but it's really called "Fast-Fit". Way off.
- Brian shared his updated personal site
- Design Details Blog
- The Internet Archive Project
Design Details on the Web:
- We are @designdetailsfm
- Brian is @brian_lovin
- Marshall is @marshallbock
- @Sarahberus and @Luperdev make us sound smarter than we are
- Join the conversation on Spectrum or leave us a review on iTunes
Stinger:
BYEEEEEEE!
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