Laws of UX - <AUTHOR> https://lawsofux.com/ <comment><USER2> The site is beautiful and I couldn't do it. But I'll still be a bit judgemental. It breaks my first law of UX: don't be self serving.

The first screen is a long scroll of 20 elegant looking blocks and titles none of which mean anything on their own. I have to click on each and sit through some superfluous animation before I can even get access to the explanation.

Because of the animation, t he natural flow of swiping back on my phone results in a really janky transition.

I have to say, I love the style of these graphics. Minimalism I guess? Reminds me of the University of Waterloo during my childhood.

<comment><USER3> > I love the style of these graphics. Minimalism I guess?

It's a "Memphis style" variant. Pretty trendy these days. Now the industry is starting to move to "Neumorphism".

<comment><USER4> > It's a "Memphis style" variant. Pretty trendy these days. Now the industry > is starting to move to "Neumorphism".

Really? I thought Memphis style was this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_Group) and this: [https://www.megapixl.com/illustration-for-hipsters- memphis-s...](https://www.megapixl.com/illustration-for-hipsters-memphis- style-illustration-67848727) (e.g. "80s style").

This website is not giving me that impression. If anything, it reminds me of a style I associate with the 60s or 70s (namely a sans serif font coupled with geometric graphics that use multiple shades of the same bright color).

Edit: I think it's closer to the "Swiss/International Style": [https://www.google.com/search?q=Swiss/International+Style+Gr...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Swiss/International+Style+Graphic+Design), but I'm by no means an expert.

<comment><USER5> It's ITS derived but the nearer referent is Material via Penguin Book covers from around 1960 to 1975, like the classic Hare Sitting Up: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/joekral/231480092/in/album-721...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/joekral/231480092/in/album-72157594264351021/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's the straightforward plaintext version:

1\. UI > UX.

2\. Respond in less than 400 ms.

3\. Make buttons clickable.

4\. Make it simpler.

5\. Copy functionality and UX off other sites.

6\. Draw borders around similar functionality.

7\. Simpler imagery is better.

8\. Users think objects next to each other do similar things.

9\. Similar items close together look like one big thing.

10\. Things that look the same (color, font, etc) will look like they do the same thing.

11\. The average person can remember 5-9 things at once.

12\. Remove all unnecessary elements.

13\. Focus on the 20% that does 80% of things.

14\. Any task will inflate until all of the available time is spent.

15\. People judge the experience by its beginning and end.

16\. Be tolerant to whatever actions the user may take.

17\. People remember the first and last items in a series.

18\. You can't reduce all the complexity.

19\. When one thing stands out from others in a group, it will be remembered.

20\. People remember incomplete tasks, i.e. use progress bars.

4 and 12 are identical. 14 has nothing to do with UX or UI. 15, 11, and 17 are the same. 18 is an excuse masquerading as a Law. From 11-18, it feels a lot of these are pulled in from some Tim Ferriss book or some generic self-help Seven Secrets of Highly Influential People. Perhaps it believes its 15th and 17th law so much that it thinks it can hide fluff in the middle of the list.

It establishes credibility with a lawsofux.com domain them then proceeds to wreck it by violating its 7th law. It does solidly prove its first law, that if you have a pretty enough site, everyone will believe it.

<comment><USER7> Your critique is based on your interpretation of the laws which is in many cases clearly incorrect.

Take for example 15. It doesn't say people judge by the beginning and the end, but by the peak and the end. Or 4 - representing Hick's law as "make it simpler" misses so much nuance that the key point is completely missed.

It rather seems like you barely skimmed the page before deciding to shit on it for arbitrary reasons.

<comment><USER6> > It rather seems like you barely skimmed the page before deciding to shit on > it for arbitrary reasons.

"People will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images as the simplest form possible, because it is the interpretation that requires the least cognitive effort of us."

If a website violates its own laws, that brings into question the credibility of the laws, or the credibility of the author of the website. Without credibility, it feels like a waste of time to do anything more than skim... perhaps this is a failure of UX?

Fair point about 15, but neither you nor the website managed to express Hick's Law any better than KISS.

<comment><USER7> So an example of an application of Hick's Law is when you have a huge country list dropdown. Per Hick's Law we know that presenting users with many choices is bad because it'll take them forever to make their pick. But if there's going to be a small number of options that the vast majority of users will choose, such as with countries it might be the US and a few EU countries, you can improve this by putting those countries first and presenting an alphabetically sorted list of the rest after them.

You can see how this doesn't just boil down to "make it simpler". And many of your summaries similarly miss the point.

I do admit that the website doesn't elaborate on the concepts very much. For example, if I hadn't known about Hick's law beforehand, I might have arrived at the same conclusion as you. But they do link further reading which seems to do the job of explaining the laws in detail. So I think the website is a nice reference if you go the extra mile and look at the links.

<comment><USER8> > But if there's going to be a small number of options that the vast majority > of users will choose, such as with countries it might be the US and a few EU > countries, you can improve this by putting those countries first and > presenting an alphabetically sorted list of the rest after them.

I hate when people do this. It messes with selection by keystroke. It's frustrating and breaks the default means of using a drop-down box.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. I'd add there's something perverse and elitist about 'solving' this problem by making it easier for one group of users and more difficult for the rest.

<comment><USER7> Ranking common countries first only seems like an issue because of our sensitive political climate. Or do you still think it's "perverse and elitist" to put commonly bought bus tickets before more rarely bought options like season tickets in ticket machine menus?

<comment><USER9> I don't think that's a good analogy. But my comment reads way harsher than I intended it. I've probably done it myself in the past – sticking a handful of key countries at the top of the selector. My point is it isn't good design, it's a lazy hack. And I think if I was a user from one of the 2nd tier countries, I'd find it pretty elitist. The ticket machine analogy doesn't apply.

<comment><USER7> Why not? It's not even an analogy, it's exactly the same hack applied to a different scenario.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I cannot even begin to fathom how a ux website that literally touts "don't make your users wait more than 400ms" as it's #2 rule also has

\- 400ms css transition

\- network load of new page

\- scrolling down to view content

\- another 400ms transition to go back to main content

as its primary mechanism of interaction... is the irony totally lost on them? Or did they drink the #1 kool aid to the extent that they believe their "design" will outweigh their myriad UX failures?

<comment><USER11> None of those things you listed are in conflict with rule #2.

The length of an animation is not the same as making your users wait for an initial response to your input. The rule is talking about how fast the computer appears to _acknowledge_ and _begin_ responding to a user input, it is not talking about how fast any given task is completed. The wait is the length of time between clicking the button and when the screen _starts_ to animate.

Animation you have to wait for can sometimes be a bad design choice on a page, and I'm not a big fan of overuse of css transitions. But a navigation transition helps the user keep mental track of where they are, and it specifically signals that the computer is responding to your input. The animation itself here doesn't break the Doherty threshold, it does the opposite, it _meets_ the Doherty threshold.

Network loading of a new page is unavoidable (out of the control of the page author), is absolutely standard practice for internet apps (see Jakob's law), and your browser (not the page) is what handles the interaction. The browsers adhere to the rules listed here to every extent possible, and they respond to page loads instantly by showing you a loading spinner, a blank page, and allowing interactions like cancelling the load while loading. Again, the interaction criteria here is that the computer acknowledges your input, not that it is required to finish something that can take time.

Scrolling is another interaction that meets rule #2, it doesn't break the rule. The rule is not about design or layout. When scrolling, if the page is moving in response to your input, then it's meeting the rule. And scrolling is one of the things browsers bend over backward to make as smooth and fast as possible.

<comment><USER10> Response to "making users wait for an animation is okay" here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24031824](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24031824)

> Network loading of a new page is unavoidable (out of the control of the page > author)

Nope, the author had complete control over how much information they wanted to show on the main page vs the details page. In desktop view they show the single-sentence descriptions on the main page, in mobile they don't. So they've forced mobile users to wait for the network load (potentially much more than 400ms) completely unnecessarily.

> Scrolling is another interaction that meets rule #2, it doesn't break the > rule.

Sure, it doesn't break rule #2 specifically, but it does break #3. And, more importantly, it's shitty UX and has no place on a "Rules of UX" website, except maybe as a counterexample.

<comment><USER11> > I'd probably prefer 400ms of a static screen to 400ms of animation.

The alternative here is no visual response to a click at all. I'm not okay with that, and I _seriously_ doubt you'd be okay with it in general. Most people aren't (this has been shown). A 400ms delay after button clicks and scrolling and other interactions is an indication that your input was not received, and it feels intolerable to people today. The 400ms standard here was set 40 years ago. Today software feels completely broken if it doesn't respond with _something_ in under 100ms, and desktop browsers typically do something within 33ms.

> the author had complete control over how much information they wanted to > show

That's irrelevant. The browser _does_ respond to your page load request instantly, with a blank page and a spinner. It doesn't break the rule.

Again, you can criticize the choices with your own opinion at a subjective level, this doesn't mean the authors aren't following their own advice. It feels like you're looking for reasons to justify not liking the page. You're free to not like the page, I won't disagree with that. What I disagree with is the reason given.

> Sure, it doesn't break rule #2 specifically, but it does break #3.

It seems like you're moving on to misunderstanding rule #3. Scrolling and clicking does not apply to Fitts' Law.

EDIT: I said scrolling doesn't apply to Fitts' law, and I meant that specifically as a reponse to, and in the context of the suggestion being made here by the parent: scrolling to find a new unknown target _plus_ acquiring a new target, _plus_ moving to click on the new target.

Fitts' Law has been studied on scrolling alone, for example: [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp- content/uploads/...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp- content/uploads/2016/02/Scrolling_CHI02.pdf)

Extending the law to include the number of interactions is going to be tautological in the sense that if number of manual interactions is your "distance" then of course more will take longer. Including targets that are unknown is just beyond the scope of what has been studied and shown, I'm saying it is not really in the spirit of Fitts' law. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law)

<comment><USER10> Are you _honestly_ , and I mean _honestly honestly_ , trying to argue that needing to scroll then move your mouse to reach a target can _not_ be thought of as a target being further away when it comes to Fitts' law and the relationship between distance and time to acquire a target? It seems to me that you are choosing to focus on the specific text used in a rule as opposed to the concept that rule is trying to convey. I don't enjoy arguing over that sort of thing whatsoever, so I'll have to call it a day and go back to spreading mulch. Good day :)

<comment><USER12> There isn't anything to be argued. You said that the scrolling violates Rule #3, which is about Fitts's law specifically. Scrolling has nothing to do with Fitts's law.

<comment><USER13> Scrolling absolutely has to do with Fitt's law. Not only is the target further away, it's constantly moving.

<comment><USER12> You should read and take to heart this comment by dahart, especially the last paragraph: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24032182](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24032182)

You've been confidently wrong about the only two rules you've commented on.

<comment><USER13> I either disagree with or do not understand either of your sentences.

<comment><USER12> The trend is unflattering for you one way or another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The only site my tech-challenged dad can kind-of use well is Craigslist. Plain text, accessible, good hierarchies, nothing buried or nested, fast, and, crucially, everything is in the same place every time he visits. Some of the best UX on the Web.

<comment><USER15> It feels like modern website design conflates "better UX" with "surface level attractiveness"

Craigslist is a great example, original reddit is another example: my UI/UX designer friend considers original reddit to be quote "ugly and horrible", and while there definitely could be some improvements, the reddit redesign (which I know my friend would come up with something similar to) is quite literally orders of magnitude worse, but is aesthetically "nicer".

Original reddit looks ugly, but everything you want from an interface is there once you get through a 3 minute learning curve: information dense, enough white space (but not too much), consistent behaviour, fast, respects scrolling, etc etc.

Where did we go "wrong" with web design that what we have now is seemingly worse? And what does a good balance of "actually functionally useful" and "aesthetically pleasing" look like?

<comment><USER10> I personally love the new reddit design: it's so miserable to use that it has broken my reddit addiction almost entirely!

Now I just need HN to do something similar and maybe I'll get back to being a productive member of society ;)

<comment><USER16> The site looks and performs fine to me with the redesign. The problems I have with it are the obnoxious "open in app!" Pop-up and the subreddit preview that interrupts the comment section... Totally unacceptable.

<comment><USER10> Those two are the precise reasons I left actually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _1\. Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that's more usable._

As a non-designer who's had to fight many designers on this, I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that this is about _perception_. It's about a user's first impression regarding usability _prior_ to actually using the system. It's not an actual impression based on their experience after interacting with it. That impression can quickly evaporate the moment they try to do anything with the interface. If time and money have to be allocated to develop a product, use them wisely. The properties of this principle seem to be more relevant to marketing and advertising than actual UX.

I believe that the wrong take-away from reading this law would be that improved esthetics implies improved usability. Attempting to place esthetics and function on the same pedestal would be a mistake. When it comes to usability, function is superior to esthetics and should almost always be given priority, no matter how ugly.

I agree that esthetics can and should be used in a way that it supports function, but as you add to it, there will always be a point of negative return (functionally speaking). If you misunderstand what that law is saying you might be misled into thinking that esthetic climax and usability climax are on the same locus. I think we can agree that something can often still be made even more beautiful way past the point where it's almost completely unusable. Adversely, you might be called into making something uglier in order for it to become useful again. Better get comfortable with the idea.

<comment><USER18> I feel like #1 is the reason that absolutely every useful web app is slowly becoming less useful to the people that use it every day by filling all the actual usable space with white to make their screenshots look better while all the power users get more and more irritated.

Even 'compact' views which seem to be a throwaway effort to alleviate these are becoming more and more spacious and forcing scrolling even on huge screens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I often see the second law being broken by the first (or a misinterpretation of it): in the eagerness to make the site look beautiful, the designer make it slow, either deliberately with animations, either inadvertently by increasing load times.

Also, I commonly see Miller's and Zeigarnik Effect being disregarded: although our working memories are not so great, we possess some and we can retain some basic information about our workflow. Then, IMHO there's more harm than good in putting a lot of visual clues, drawers, panes over panes etc. so that navigation is "improved".

Speaking particularly about form-based enterprise applications, I keep thinking that some important empirically learned lessons from the last 40 years are simply being thrown away. Simple, correct and, most important, FAST interfaces trumps everything else, even if it's a TUI.

Oh, and regular users also can and ENJOY using the keyboard -- a tool which is being deprecated in this mistake of trying to create a uniform experience between desktop and mobile.

<comment><USER20> I'm not entirely convinced simple is better for enterprise apps. I'm a consultant who has to jump around between a lot of project management tools like Asana, Jira, and Azure devops and the simpler the interfaces make me far more frustrated.

They all have pretty much the same functionality, but some hide functionality for UI's sake. Then anytime I need to do something new, instead of looking around a busy screen, I'm sifting through a bunch of websites I found on google.

<comment><USER19> I think simplicity doesn't necessarily mean having less widgets on the screen.

If, by removing widgets, those interfaces are making you to perform more steps and to think more to find and execute the functionality you need, then I'd say those interfaces are getting more complex actually.

Besides, this is another common mistake in current UX trends, IMO. They seem to assume that interfaces can always be simpler, as if there weren't fundamental bottom limits to complexity; and, to make things even worse, they remove widgets, replace text with icons etc., seeming to believe in a positive correlation between complexity and amount of stuff in the screen

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is not new and is almost entirely covered in two reference resources I use as a designer.

1\. Universal Principles of Design [https://g.co/kgs/X19MeR](https://g.co/kgs/X19MeR)

2\. The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin [https://g.co/kgs/JfdBkB](https://g.co/kgs/JfdBkB)

<comment><USER22> Please just post the URL instead of using a redirect link, especially if you're just doing a google search for the words you posted.

1\. [https://www.google.com/search?q=Universal+Principles+of+Desi...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Universal+Principles+of+Design)

2\. [https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Humane+Interface](https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Humane+Interface)

<comment><USER21> I just used Google's built in "share" button, is that incorrect in some way?

<comment><USER23> less friendly as it obscures the destination to the user. it could have been a rickroll or something pertinent given the url

<comment><USER24> I think this is bikeshedding.

Edit: bear in mind vanilla search URLs include personal info, which you need to know how to identify & strip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Usage of monospace font and questionable accessibility practices put into question the authority of this resource.

That aside, what most UI/UX rules fail to capture is that our experience of X exists over time and in larger context. Aside from things with near-zero intended lifespan (which this one may well be—I won't pretend I know author's intention), it is not only (and not so much) important how a product or resource is experienced right at this moment, but also how it will feel after a while, how it would evolve, how it interoperates with other software or resources (including search engines), what resources are required to maintain it, etc. True beauty arises from functionality and sustainability.

</comment><comment><USER26> What's with the oceans of empty space between everything? Who likes this?

Please put more than one thing on the screen at a time, especially when those things are links that lead to the actual content.

Also, when I click through to one of the laws, there's no indication that I have to scroll down, so I'm clicking around for a few seconds like an idiot trying to figure out what to do.

I feel like I'm crazy... Is this _really_ considered good UX?

</comment><comment><USER27> The 0th law of UX: Any website that attempts to describe good UX will itself be criticized for bad UX.

<comment><USER28> Well yeah you better preach what you teach or look like an idiot

<comment><USER29> HN users, on the whole, are terrible UX critics who have no idea what they're talking about on the subject.

The average HN user probably:

\- knows their way around a terminal

\- understands default browser behavior in depth

\- has the programmer's mentality of 'everything should be governed by universal logical rules that apply equally everywhere'

The truth is, this is not how most users think. Good UX for a cli application is not the same as good UX for a website. If you think of websites in terms of what programmers think good UX is, you get... HN and Craigslist and all the other things that HN users typically think are fantastic user experiences, because they meet their expectations. These applications are also almost uniformly ugly. This actually makes perfect sense, and for these users, this is fantastic UX.

But what makes UX good is that the target audience can easily use the software. That's it. There's no such thing as an 'intuitive user interface'. Clicking on stuff in computers is not natively intuitive to humans. There are only familiar and unfamiliar interfaces. Every interface we haven't seen before is unfamiliar and 'terrible' at first glance. People will train themselves to use and love extremely bad interfaces, or refuse to use very good interfaces that are difficult to learn. The HN user is someone who has typically put a lot of effort into learning how computers work and how web browsers work by default, so they develop intuitions like, "If a website breaks the default browser behavior, it's bad UX." And for them, that's true, but what makes the default browser UX better than an alternative, other than that you already know it? Now maybe it actually is better, and I can think of many examples of websites that change default behavior in ways that are absolutely worse. But I've also seen websites do cool things with scrolljacking that aren't inherently wrong because they defied expectations for 3 seconds.

Every application has to be learned by the user. How easy it is to learn it depends on the background knowledge and experiences of the user, so it's very very hard, if not completely impossible, to develop a UX that will be good for every possible user. But if some UX isn't good FOR YOU, that doesn't mean that it's bad, it might just mean you aren't the target audience.

<comment><USER30> _> If you think of websites in terms of what programmers think good UX is, you get... HN and Craigslist and all the other things that HN users typically think are fantastic user experiences, because they meet their expectations. These applications are also almost uniformly ugly. This actually makes perfect sense, and for these users, this is fantastic UX._

So would you argue that the Craigslist experience is only good for those with the "programmer's mentality"? "Ugly" is perhaps a smaller factor in UX than designers account for.

 _> And for them, that's true, but what makes the default browser UX better than an alternative, other than that you already know it?_

Nothing, that's just it: you already know it. What you call "programmer's mentality" is actually fundamental to human cognition. In making sense of things we use what we've already made sense of. The more we can rely on our existing knowledge to figure something out, the less cognitive friction there will be.

The cost of surprise can certainly be outweighed by other factors, or surprise in itself can be exploited to usefully convey something, but in my experience it is not generally used to these effects. For every zooming interface or slideshow where scrolljacking might make perfect sense there are hundreds where those three seconds of defied expectations are wasted to implement something that is either useless or entirely detrimental to usability.

 _> But if some UX isn't good FOR YOU, that doesn't mean that it's bad, it might just mean you aren't the target audience._

Or I am the target audience and the designers have failed to design for the target audience. Or I am not the target audience only because the designer has failed to identify and characterize their target audience correctly. Or the designers primarily work with making business-required anti-features bearable. Or they're optimizing for first impressions and not long term usability. Or they're optimizing for generating more work opportunities ahead of themselves.

To decidedly say that you, our user, is not our intended target audience seems like a conclusion that must be backed with _a lot_ of data, something which IME not a lot of organizations can muster. From that perspective these alternatives seem more likely.

<comment><USER29> I don't think you're arguing against what I actually said.

> _So would you argue that the Craigslist experience is only good for those > with the "programmer's mentality"?_

No, I think I was clear - I think the Craiglist experience is good for people who are familiar with simple sites like Craigslist, but not for all people. Craigslist has a very simple UX, so it would be hard to find someone who had trouble using it. It would be easy to find someone who finds the UX unpleasant, because I personally find it unpleasant because it's very ugly.

> _Nothing, that 's just it: you already know it. What you call "programmer's > mentality" is actually fundamental to human cognition. In making sense of > things we use what we've already made sense of. The more we can rely on our > existing knowledge to figure something out, the less cognitive friction > there will be._

Here, you're just agreeing with me, except that I didn't call the "programmer's mentality" the general rule of familiarity, it was the general rule that all things must behave according to the same rules.

> _The cost of surprise can certainly be outweighed by other factors, or > surprise in itself can be exploited to usefully convey something, but in my > experience it is not generally used to these effects. For every zooming > interface or slideshow where scrolljacking might make perfect sense there > are hundreds where those three seconds of defied expectations are wasted to > implement something that is either useless or entirely detrimental to > usability._

I'm not claiming anywhere that it's impossible to make a bad UX, either by breaking previously known rules OR by following them, I'm claiming that good UX is context based and the rule of "scrolljacking is always bad" isn't true. You seem to agree with me here.

> _Or I am the target audience and the designers have failed to design for the > target audience. Or I am not the target audience only because the designer > has failed to identify and characterize their target audience correctly. Or > the designers primarily work with making business-required anti-features > bearable. Or they 're optimizing for first impressions and not long term > usability. Or they're optimizing for generating more work opportunities > ahead of themselves._

Sure, bad UX exists, and these are plausible reasons why it might happen. I never claimed that no UX ever was bad for any reason.

> _To decidedly say that you, our user, is not our intended target audience > seems like a conclusion that must be backed with a lot of data, something > which IME not a lot of organizations can muster. From that perspective these > alternatives seem more likely._

Here you're either misunderstanding me or knocking down a straw man. I didn't use the word 'decidedly', I said it 'might mean'. I also wasn't focused on the perspective of the organization or person creating a user experience, I was focusing on the person consuming it and criticizing it, without any regard for _everyone else_ who also consumes it and whether they might agree that the UX is 'obviously' terrible.

To give a concrete example: Slack recently released a redesign, and I personally hate it and many of the interactions it created. Most people I know love it and had no issues adapting to the changes they made. Did Slack release a bad UX? I would argue no, even though I _personally_ do not like the UX they created, because I think I am a rare case and for the majority of their userbase, they made the correct call and improved the experience. It seems to me that most arguments on HN about UX boil down to "I immediately closed the tab because it hijacked my scrolling, terrible UX." I'm saying that's a bad argument, and your personal enjoyment is not a complete picture of what makes an experience good or bad for the complete audience of users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> _Aesthetically pleasing design can mask usability problems_

I'm not sure that motivation deserves praise.

 _Provide system feedback within 400ms in order to keep users' attention and increase productivity._

That's _horrible_ lag. Try 30ms. I get frustrated whenever the responsiveness is slower than I can hit keyboard shortcuts or click. I even turn off Android animations as they slow me down.

 _Touch targets should be large enough for users to both discern what it is and to accurately select them... Touch targets should have ample spacing between each other_

Sure thing hoss. But don't take it too far. The wasted screen real estate on your site is abominable.

...I had to stop after the first few...

</comment><comment><USER32> Great compilation! But 12-14 don't seem to have direct relevance to to UX. (Occam's Razor, 80/20 rule, and "work expands to fill available time".)

<comment><USER33> Are you thinking of UI?

Some of these may be more pertinent while analyzing User Experience compared to composing User Experience.

Occam's Razor: What is this control meant to do?

Pareto: does this UX cover at least 80% of the user's needs? Are there critical cases in the remaining 20%?

Parkinson's Law is more of a bank shot, but think of it along with the Pareto Principle: Organize the UX so that the user can accomplish the most important tasks in the least time.

<comment><USER32> > Are you thinking of UI?

No. I'm saying if you squint hard enough, then maybe you can think of how these apply to UX, but they don't _directly_ indicate some insight of UX, in any way like the others do.

> Occam's Razor: What is this control meant to do?

If that's how they mean to apply it, they should phrase it as "users make the inference about the control that requires the fewest assumptions about how to model the UI". There's a big difference between saying how users _actually_ act, vs how you as an engineer should infer, or what you should optimize for.

And yes, if the latter is meant, then it's applicable on some level, it's just not specific to UX (just making inferences about data in general), and even then didn't make clear how it would apply in a UX scenario.

>Pareto: does this UX cover at least 80% of the user's needs? Are there critical cases in the remaining 20%?

That wouldn't be the Pareto principle, that would be "check the 20% for if you're missing something critical."

Again, a tangential application, if you stretch, just not direct like the others.

>Parkinson's Law is more of a bank shot, but think of it along with the Pareto Principle: Organize the UX so that the user can accomplish the most important tasks in the least time.

That's orthogonal to Parkinson's law, which says that time spent will bloat to its bounds. What you've described is a different principle, something like "minimize the time average spent to do tasks, thus giving more weight to the more frequent ones".

LATE EDIT: With that said, those three should definitely be part of any UX engineer's mental toolkit ... but only in the sense that they should be part of _any_ engineer's toolkit. The specific applicability to UX isn't obvious the way the others are, at least.

<comment><USER33> > "With that said, those three should definitely be part of any UX engineer's > mental toolkit ... but only in the sense that they should be part of any > engineer's toolkit. The specific applicability to UX isn't obvious the way > the others are, at least."

I think that's fair. I will say that I appreciate this site, but I do think the author had to stretch a bit to get to 20 rules. For instance, I would have had a section just on the Gestalt Principles because they don't make much sense by themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> _LAWS OF UX

Aesthetic Usability Effect 01 Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that's more usable.

Doherty Threshold 02 Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace (<400ms) that ensures that neither has to wait on the other.

Fitts's Law 03 The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.

Hick's Law 04 The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.

Jakob's Law 05 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.

Law of Common Region 06 Elements tend to be perceived into groups if they are sharing an area with a clearly defined boundary.

Law of Prägnanz 07 People will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images as the simplest form possible, because it is the interpretation that requires the least cognitive effort of us.

Law of Proximity 08 Objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together.

Law of Similarity 09 The human eye tends to perceive similar elements in a design as a complete picture, shape, or group, even if those elements are separated.

Law of Uniform Connectedness 10 Elements that are visually connected are perceived as more related than elements with no connection.

Miller's Law 11 The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory.

Occam's Razor 12 Among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.

Pareto Principle 13 The Pareto principle states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

Parkinson's Law 14 Any task will inflate until all of the available time is spent.

Peak-End Rule 15 People judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak and at its end, rather than the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.

Postel's Law 16 Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.

Serial Position Effect 17 Users have a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a series.

Tesler's Law 18 Tesler's Law, also known as The Law of Conservation of Complexity, states that for any system there is a certain amount of complexity which cannot be reduced.

Von Restorff Effect 19 The Von Restorff effect, also known as The Isolation Effect, predicts that when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered.

Zeigarnik Effect 20 People remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks. _

<comment><USER35> Thank you so much.

Rule 21 should be: don't make the user click 20 times.

<comment><USER36> Or scroll 20 minutes to reach the bottom of the page.

<comment><USER37> Maybe we all read the site name wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Postel's Law ("Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send") is a bad idea. You should be conservative in both, which will result in broken software, but broken software gets fixed. Postel's Law adds avoidable complexity, and complexity is a major source of security vulnerabilities. Unlike broken software, insecure software often stays insecure until it's being actively exploited.

<comment><USER39> As someone who has spent their entire career in infosec, one of my most important rules is "security should break your company". The alternative is, someone else will break your company for you. If you can't produce a document that explains what this server does and every external interaction it could possibly have, you're failing. Be _extremely_ conservative in what you accept.

If you're allowing basically anything in, eventually the wrong person with the wrong code will get in. And that might very well be the last day you have a business.

<comment><USER40> I agree that in general Postel's law is bad practice but I think that it also makes sense under certain contexts. For example, if you have an email input field, it's better to trim spaces from the user input before sending it to the server instead of showing an error that there's spaces needing to be trimmed. In this example the input field is liberal in what it accepts and conservative in what it sends to the server.

<comment><USER41> That might be the issue, what is "liberal" and "conservative" needs to be quantified. Taking Postel's law or any law/adage to an extreme is a bad idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> "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."

A lot of designers should write this down 100 times before they start working. An extension should be

"users prefer your site to work the same way as it did yesterday since that's what they already know."

<comment><USER15> _looks pointedly at Spotify_

Can we also have some rule about the maximum frequency of changes? Alternatively can I go one further and suggest that for UI/UX changes, agile style sprints are absolutely not the way they should be done? Rushing out change after change in the UX won't let you actually see what works and, and let you iterate, it just disrupts users. These changes should be thoroughly thought through, distilled, tested properly - not wildly deployed onto a subset of users, and if necessary, grouped up and deployed altogether so that there is only one UI change to adapt to, not 30.

<comment><USER42> "grouped up and deployed altogether so that there is only one UI change to adapt to, not 30."

that's what I am disliking more and more about rapid releases. If there is a big change once a year, I can take time to read the release notes and learn what changed. But if there is a change once a month I can't keep up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that's more > usable.

Is that right? Personally I feel like the opposite is true; I'll take an ugly looking but very usable UI over one that has all the bells and whistles but is actually a nightmare to use. Surely when the UI is bad and the UX is also bad the effect is compounded, and first time users might very well perceive the combination of bad UI/good UX as much worse than good UI/bad UX, but I really don't think this should be given out as good advice.

<comment><USER44> That's not what the "law" says at all.

If you have two websites with very similar UX, both very usable with the same quirks, one beautiful and one ugly, users will be more forgiving towards the beautiful one.

<comment><USER45> I think "UI>UX" is very clearly saying that user interface is more important than user experience.

<comment><USER44> Where do you see "UI>UX"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This site feels like the product of a graphic designer trying to formally learn UX, and a classic case of theory & book smarts not translating to practice.

</comment><comment><USER47> > Jakob's Law

I have a problem with that law.

EDIT: TL;DR/Clarification: What matters is what users believe as "intuitive and easily usable" which is _not_ implied by something being familiar nor by what most other sites or apps do.

People don't want your site to work like other sites at all.

They want your site to work "intuitive and easily usable" for them.

As such they only want your site to behave like other sites if what they perceive as "intuitive and easily usable" was coined bye such "other" sites.

But in reality what user perceive as "intuitive and easily usable" is often largely coined bey the UX patterns around which they "learned" to use tech initially.

Which means what is "intuitive and easily usable" is often displaced in time and depending on your audience might MAJORLY differ from what most other sites you can find today in the internet do!!

A good example is sourcehut (e.g. look at `[https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/scdoc`](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/scdoc`)).

It's visually completely different from what most other github like sites do and probably for some people it might look bad.

But for their target audience it's supper appealing as it appeals to what that audience originally learned to be "intuitive and easily usable".

So I would strongly argue that Jakob's Law is a harmful over simplification of the actual effect which might be ok for some target audiences but literally might brake your business if applied blindly.

<comment><USER48> > (e.g. look at > `[https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/scdoc`](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/scdoc`)).

HN doesn't have backticks syntax, so the trailing one is getting inculded as part of the link and 404ing. Fixed link: [https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/scdoc](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/scdoc)

<comment><USER47> Thanks for the reminder, total leap of judgement in on my part. I really shouldn't write comments after/just before midnight ;-).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Postel's Law is bad - "be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send". It has a history of destroying technical standards. Remember how so much HTML was broken on conforming browsers ten years ago? That's because Microsoft wrote their browser to accept any broken crap you gave it, so that's just what everybody did.

</comment><comment><USER50> Many people in this thread are criticizing the website's design, as though to criticize the content itself. In case it's not clear from the website: they did not make any of these observations themselves, they just curated and presented a list of observations other people made, usually decades ago. It doesn't follow that any ineffective design or unclear wording on the presenting website reflects on the validity of the source content.

A stronger criticism, at least in my opinion, is that presenting observations about user behavior as "laws" is misleading, since humans aren't particles. You can have laws in physical science, but not in design. If you thought of these as laws rather than wise words to bear in mind, you'd be an ineffective designer.

<comment><USER51> To be fair to the critics, there is a difference between posting a blog post about laws of UX and creating a site with a domain of 'lawsofux.com' dedicated to the practice. In this case, I would assume that the site I am interacting with is trying to adhere to its rules how it interprets them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> This is a great example of my own first law of UX: Almost everyone is terrible at UX, including people who think they are experts at it.

</comment><comment><USER53> Rule 21: your text and content should be readable. The very low contrast between the numbering and the grey background is distracting and looks like a video game "make the second image barely visible" configuration.

</comment><comment><USER54> Only skimmed the content for now and can already appreciate the quality of the thinking and how it is presented. Thank you.

I also love how the site looks and behaves exactly the same with or without javascript (ublock origin user here) EXCEPT for the menu which relies on js.

I wonder if site creator can be persuaded to replace that js dependency with the "checkbox hack"[0] at least for the basic navigation.

[0] [https://css-tricks.com/the-checkbox-hack/](https://css-tricks.com/the- checkbox-hack/)

</comment><comment><USER55> Some (hopefully) constructive feedback based on my experience on this site:

\- At first, the site looked like a slideshow with prominent prev/next at the top and a title content that takes the entirely of my desktop monitor. So, naturally, I hit the keyboard right arrow (like most slideshow web pages) to get to the next slide for content, and nothing happened.

\- Then at the bottom left, there's a down button. So I scrolled down to find the content there. I read it, and still subconsciously hit keyboard right for the next slide...oops, I mean, page...because of the prev/next at the top (sure, pebkac and all that; but it's also expectations-setting).

\- Then I clicked on "next" to get another page that again takes the full monitor for the title, requiring scrolling down to get to the content, all of which can easily fit on a single screen. It seems unnecessarily "distracting", in a sense, since the expectation is that the user would actually go through the content and not just the titles which themselves are not very informative.

\- One way I tried to improve ergonomics was to hitting page-down to read the content and then tab a couple times to get to the next button (almost automatic). However...the focus indicator for the "next button" has been removed in CSS, which is another usability nono.

Of at least tangential relevance here are Doherty Threshold (slide 2) and Jakob's law (slide 5). Just my 2c.

</comment><comment><USER56> > _Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that's more > usable._

Figures that would be rule number one. Everywhere you go there are pretty UI's that are garbage, functionally.

Animation, transparent fading, no distracting scroll-bars or borders, wrapped around a 1-2-3 menu selection.

> _Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace ( > <400ms) that ensures that neither has to wait on the other._

That is just nonsense. Productivity soars the faster the computer is. Ideally, the user should never waits for the computer; everything should be instant.

Whether the user waits for the computer is neither here nor there.

The ultimate computer-does-not-wait-for-the-user is to have the users prepare job specifications entirely outside of the computer and then submit them to a clerk at a job window. The computer never waits for a user because the job queue is busy from numerous users. It is not very good UI.

In an actual interactive UI, a needless delay could be caused by, for instance, collecting the necessary parameters for an operation through a cascade of multiple dialogs instead of batching them together. Though the computer waits more, too, that's irrelevant; the user's time is what was wasted.

I'm amazed anyone pretending to be a UI person would even feign being interested in how much time the machine spends waiting for the user.

<comment><USER57> The 400 ms threshold cited for the Doherty threshold is from a 1982 research paper. I imagine that in 1982, 400 ms response times felt pretty darn good.

Also, the nature of the tasks that users performed in 1982 may have meant that there was no benefit to <400ms response times. (If it takes twenty seconds to read and understand the output, and another ten to key in your next command, then a 400 ms delay is not a meaningful productivity drag.)

Today, I would guess that the threshold is closer to 50 ms.

(Also, "time spent by the computer waiting for the user" makes sense in the context of a 1982 research paper. That has changed in the last 28 years, to say the least.)

All of this is a long way off saying that if you are making UX decisions based on 28 year old research, you are on shaky ground!

<comment><USER56> 1982 was 38 years ago, not 28.

The microcomputers I used in 1982 had instantaneous response time.

Most of the software was developed by assembly language die-hards.

400 ms is more acceptable if there is no jitter in it, in comparison to unpredictable response time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> This is what I would like to suggest:

1\. make it respond fast to input (it is super annoying that some textboxes are not pure native textboxes anymore and have deep javascript logic behind that sometimes I see characters popping up slowly as I type!)

2\. avoid low contrast between text and background (it's hard to read your light gray text on white background)

3\. make it clear what a button is and what a label is (a blue label being a button on iOS)

4\. avoid wasting screen space, stop making fonts huge unnecessarily (if you wasted half the screen size by couple of words or there are big empty spaces where is your content really, what are bigger screens good for then)

5\. stop designing desktop UIs like it was a smarphone (scrollbar should really be big enough to move by mouse and handle should have contrast to the slider; I am not touching my desktop screen or scrolling by swiping and hopefully never be)

6\. for text content (descriptions, articles, comments, etc) stop preventing right click, copying text or messing up with clipboard (like appending some garbage at the end of copied text)

7\. stop inventing original design widgets no one asked for and it is not immediately obvious how they work and easy to use / just an additional option (I have seen many toggles where it was unclear whether they are in On or Off state; or widgets lost ability to be controlled by the keyboard; or date fields which I could fill in in 2 seconds by keyboard but they forced me to spend minutes by selecting year first, listing months, finding the day in some unnecessary calendar popups)

Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER59> This is how it looks for me in the Materialistic Hackernews app

[https://ibb.co/ZJr2MXG](https://ibb.co/ZJr2MXG)

Certainly some fine UI laws in action.

<comment><USER60> maybe update android webview?

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> <ad> Shameless plug: If you want 81 more: [https://uxbook.io](https://uxbook.io) </ad>

<comment><USER62> Added to cart! But in similar vein, do you know if UX writing is a viable career? If so, how would one get into it? What should be on one's portfolio?

<comment><USER61> I think writing in tech for a publisher is probably not a viable career. I'm a full time UX person, and the book was a side-gig. If it had been my only income for the last couple of years; I'd be broke. It's a great exercise for any expert in their field, but it's hard to make a living writing. In my experience, YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I'm not cruising for irony here, but trying to use this site is a huge pain.

</comment><comment><USER64> This is on user interfaces _for sites that are selling something._ It's not for user interfaces that are for _doing_ something.

<comment><USER33> My basic definition of UX is providing users data and decisions in a certain context.

In some contexts (selling), certain things are more important, like having a beautiful appearance and no data overload. Your first time user may be your most common user, because they may only make one purchase per [lifetime, year, etc]

In other contexts, for instance industrial controls, data density is more important, and the user may be expected to take more time to learn the interface. There is still some need to accommodate new users, because everyone is a new user at some point.

In any case, there is a decision to be made, aided by some data presentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I think the first law gives ux people too much of a license. Who decides what is "aesthetic?" When it's designers to begin with they can use to justify all sorts of pretty but user-unfriendly designs. One of the best examples in my mind was that spate of poor contrast color schemes from the mid 2010s that was fairly common and still persists on some sites.

</comment><comment><USER65> To be snarky: A page titled "Laws of UX" probably shouldn't have black text on a dark grey background (the law numbers)

</comment><comment><USER66> #13, the Pareto Principle, is the main source of digital inequality nowadays. Lots of modern UIs do not perform well in terms of accessibility, because backlog is never prioritized for minority groups of users. The art of inclusive communications will never exist if we continue applying this as a law, instead of focusing on reducing the costs of accessibility.

<comment><USER67> Accessibility is the sort of thing that has to be regulated into existence because the economic cost-benefit often cannot be justified. Similar to handicap parking, ramps, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Cannot take this article seriously. The best UX for this content is clearly a single page of text with 20 sections.

<comment><USER69> This is, without a doubt, one of the worst UXs I've ever used.

This cobbler's children have no shoes. Not because he doesn't care about his children, or can't be bothered after a long day. No; this cobbler simply doesn't know how to make shoes.

edit: is the site satire? Poe's law is strong with this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Can't really trust UX advice from a site with such annoying UX.

</comment><comment><USER71> I don't buy the first one about apparent usability.

The claim that better aesthetics are perceived as better usability is based on a 1995 study by Kurosu and Kashimura. The study was done on 156 students of a Japanese design school and 96 students of a Japanese university psychology course.

That's already an over 160% sample bias towards very likely extremely aesthetically-minded people, not to mention that the Japanese have an ancient culture of aesthetics ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_aesthetics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_aesthetics)) which in itself renders the study and its conclusions culturally irrelevant to global audiences.

</comment><comment><USER72> I find it ironic that the number heading contrast with the background is almost non-existent.

</comment><comment><USER73> UX of this website is horrible. It is rather stylish but makes it incredibly hard to understand what the author wanted to say. This [1] commenter here did a better job in simple plaintext.

Thus, for the breach of the Laws ot UX, by the authority granted to me by myself, I sentence the author of the website to 2 months of studying GNOME HIG. [2]

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24034941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24034941)

[2]: [https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/](https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/)

</comment><comment><USER74> This is exactly like those UX Instagram accounts that for example say "make sure to have a high enough text contrast" then procedes to completely brake that rule in the next post.

</comment><comment><USER75> Noticed that keyboard navigation (tabbing, focus order, focus rings, etc.) didn't work on this site. Maybe I'm being pedantic but a baseline for good UX should be accessibility.

</comment><comment><USER76> Some of you might also be interested in The Laws Of Simplicity by John Maeda

[http://lawsofsimplicity.com/](http://lawsofsimplicity.com/)

</comment><comment><USER77> People here have a lot of nit-picks about the design of this site. Throwing mine in: I dislike that it's logo is a triangle containing a circle and a square. Reminds me too much of a Witch House album cover, or some other "dark" aesthetic appropriating that look. Kind of hard to put into words, but that symbol carries a smugness that seems just a little more pronounced outside of a 2020 goth context. I'm not trying to be persuasive, just honest.

</comment><comment><USER78> When I was first getting in web design (mainly for fun, but also a bit of profit), I read 'Don't Make Me Think'[1] it really helped me understand the difference between good and bad web usability design.

\---

[1] [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dont-Make-Think-Revisited- Usability...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dont-Make-Think-Revisited- Usability/dp/0321965515/)

(Non-affiliate link. I'm just recommending a book I found helpful...)

</comment><comment><USER79> After reading all the comments of the UX experts here I almost feel that I need to apologise to have enjoyed this list of nice cards over a list of bullet points.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Discussion from 2018:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16185118](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16185118)

</comment><comment><USER80> Side Note: I'm not an UX Expert and won't comment, my sites usually looks like Xmass trees !

What IS interesting is how many times this site([https://lawsofux.com/](https://lawsofux.com/)) has been submitted and not received ANY comments and now about the 10th time it got submitted, it has 226 comments :) ? lol HackerNews can be so weird at times.

</comment><comment><USER81> This is great. But IMO, the real fundamental aspect of UX, from which all others emerge, is the law of having a great information architecture.

I wrote more about this here: [https://simpleprogrammer.com/information- architecture-develo...](https://simpleprogrammer.com/information-architecture- developers-learning-design/).

<comment><USER22> > Want To Earn More... And Receive Extra Recognition? Take this self assement > and see how you can boost your software development career today! Yes, Show > Me How!

I wanted to read your thoughts but your pop-up modal prevented me from reading your article and also decreased the probability that I'll ever visit your website again.

<comment><USER81> It's not actually my site. I just guest posted there. But try refreshing and see if it helps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> For a UX page about the laws of UX I'm very happy I am a law breaker. This site is terrible for communicating it's point.

</comment><comment><USER83> oh my fridging gawd, i am so triggered by this. the site linked to is supposed to advertise a book on ux with some example content and yet literally every comment here is suggesting a way to improve on the UX of that with some even just downright reformatting the content as a comment.

i hope they don't sell a single book as this serves as an example of how to not do UX.

</comment><comment> yoz-y Oh. The last time this came around I remember writing a digest because the site was hard to read. [https://yozy.net/2018/01/10-laws-of-ux- digested/](https://yozy.net/2018/01/10-laws-of-ux-digested/)

It seems that it got updated with double the rules since then.

</comment><comment><USER84> No one mentioning that the site being SPA makes it laggy? If this were a static webpage - and it should - the scrolling would be 100% responsive. Instead on my 2015 macbook the animation stutters when loading the page in and scrolling down too fast incurs a delay while the content loads.

</comment><comment><USER85> It's missing a warning about modes. That is a serious omission.

If you want to learn about UX, Nielsen Norman Group's website is a good place to start:

[https://www.nngroup.com](https://www.nngroup.com)

</comment><comment><USER86> > "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."

While likely accurate, this thinking is likely not conducive to UX innovation.

</comment><comment><USER87> It's missing by far the most important law: if the user uses the program the same way after a year of usage it's a failed program - in other words good program design needs to allow the user to grow.

</comment><comment><USER88> I've got serious doubts about a list of 'UX laws' that doesn't include any references to affordances (or anything else from 'The Design of Everyday Things').

Also, this site is impossible to read?

</comment><comment><USER89> Am I the only one that thinks these are UI rules and not specifically UX?

</comment><comment><USER90> Previously discussed in 2018: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16185118](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16185118)

</comment><comment><USER91> [https://i.imgur.com/g1QERdk.png](https://i.imgur.com/g1QERdk.png) I guess the Materialistic app does need some TLC though

</comment><comment><USER92> I need to do an analysis of all of these with Microsoft Teams. That piece of software breaks so many fundamental UX laws. One of the worst culprits I've ever seen.

</comment><comment><USER93> Because of the logo (and general quality of the site), I thought this was affiliated with Google and the Material project, but it doesn't appear to be.

</comment><comment><USER33> How does your organization approach UX? Do you feel like it is taken seriously?

To me UX is modern day industrial design - both for internal tools and for products.

</comment><comment><USER40> Love the color schemes and animations. Nicely done.

Some feedback:

\- Make clicking the browser back button resume in the same position user was instead of taking them back to the top of the page.

\- Move the 'Serial Position Effect' item to be the last item in the list for greater effect.

\- Link directly to the PDF for the posters instead of the dropbox folder. Also having a separate page for all the downloads would be nice.

\- Speed up the animations on the linked pages since they're a bit slow.

\- Doing the shape animations as the user scrolls down the page could be interesting instead of the static images.

</comment><comment><USER94> Wallpaper versions:

[https://t.co/Hj9MLMaDVM?amp=1](https://t.co/Hj9MLMaDVM?amp=1)

</comment><comment><USER95> Rule no. 0: People will always complain about your UX choices /s

Seriously. What are your most appealing UX designs these days?

</comment><comment><USER96> Law 21: You can never please everyone.

</comment><comment><USER97> Law 21: Check text contrast on your page. Black text on dark gray background is hard to read.

</comment><comment><USER98> Stop doing this to design. Please!

</comment><comment><USER99> weird that a 20 UX rule website is so hostile to navigate on mobile.

for each role you click to get in then swipe all the way past the fold to get to the sentence of interest then swipe all the way past the footer (!) to get to the next rule

</comment><comment><USER100> "The useability flaws of an application are invisible to its designer."

</comment><comment><USER101> Everyone has a different definition of UX. That makes the term meaningless.

</comment><comment><USER102> Plaintext:

LAWS OF UX

01\. Aesthetic Usability Effect: Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that's more usable.

02\. 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.

03\. Fitts's Law: The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.

04\. Hick's Law: The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.

05\. 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.

06\. Law of Common Region: Elements tend to be perceived into groups if they are sharing an area with a clearly defined boundary.

07\. Law of Prägnanz: People will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images as the simplest form possible, because it is the interpretation that requires the least cognitive effort of us.

08\. Law of Proximity: Objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together.

09\. 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.

10\. Law of Uniform Connectedness: Elements that are visually connected are perceived as more related than elements with no connection.

11\. Miller's Law: The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory.

12\. Occam's Razor: Among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.

13\. Pareto Principle: The Pareto principle states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

14\. Parkinson's Law: Any task will inflate until all of the available time is spent.

15\. Peak-End Rule: People judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak and at its end, rather than the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.

16\. Postel's Law: Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.

17\. Serial Position Effect: Users have a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a series.

18\. Tesler's Law: Tesler's Law, also known as The Law of Conservation of Complexity, states that for any system there is a certain amount of complexity which cannot be reduced.

19\. Von Restorff Effect: The Von Restorff effect, also known as The Isolation Effect, predicts that when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered.

20\. Zeigarnik Effect: People remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.

<comment><USER103> Edited to take into account the laws of UX:

LAWS OF UX

01\. Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that's more usable.

02\. Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace (<400ms) that ensures that neither has to wait on the other.

03\. The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.

04\. The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.

05\. 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.

06\. Elements tend to be perceived into groups if they are sharing an area with a clearly defined boundary.

07\. People will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images as the simplest form possible, because it is the interpretation that requires the least cognitive effort.

08\. Objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together.

09\. The human eye tends to perceive similar elements in a design as a complete picture, shape, or group, even if those elements are separated.

10\. Elements that are visually connected are perceived as more related than elements with no connection.

11\. The average person can only keep 7 items in their working memory.

12\. Among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.

13\. For many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

14\. Any task will inflate until all of the available time is spent.

15\. People judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak and at its end, rather than the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.

16\. Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.

17\. Users have a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a series.

18\. For any system there is a certain amount of complexity which cannot be reduced.

19\. When multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered.

20\. People remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER104> Copy-paste highlight from every page, for easier read:

1\. Aesthetic Usability Effect - Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that's more usable

2\. 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

3\. Fitts's Law - The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target

4\. Hick's Law - The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices

5\. 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

6\. Law of Common Region - Elements tend to be perceived into groups if they are sharing an area with a clearly defined boundary

7\. Law of Prägnanz - People will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images as the simplest form possible, because it is the interpretation that requires the least cognitive effort of us

8\. Law of Proximity - Objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together

9\. 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

10\. Law of Uniform Connectedness - Elements that are visually connected are perceived as more related than elements with no connection

11\. Miller's Law - The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory

12\. Occam's Razor - Among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected

13\. Pareto Principle - The Pareto principle states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes

14\. Parkinson's Law - Any task will inflate until all of the available time is spent

15\. Peak-End Rule - People judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak and at its end, rather than the total sum or average of every moment of the experience

16\. Postel's Law - Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send

17\. Serial Position Effect - Users have a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a series

18\. Tesler's Law - Tesler's Law, also known as The Law of Conservation of Complexity, states that for any system there is a certain amount of complexity which cannot be reduced

19\. Von Restorff Effect - The Von Restorff effect, also known as The Isolation Effect, predicts that when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered

20\. Zeigarnik Effect - People remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed task

<comment><USER105> Thank you! I was thinking that the site should offer a simple list as an option.

Ironically, in the strict (and best) sense of the notion "user interface" (i.e. being an effective, efficient, easy conveyance of information to/from computer and user), yours is better than the fancy site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> Can you disable horizontal scrolling on the menu on mobile please

</comment><comment><USER107> What do the shapes mean?

<comment><USER108> the shapes are the raison d'etre for the article.

"How many UX concepts can I attempt to illustrate with basic shapes and shading?"

<comment><USER109> I'll hazard a guess: the site is a portfolio piece, meant to show off both the author's ability to make artistic design, and their familiarity with some theory behind UX.

If it were meant to convey information first, it would have looked like this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24031163](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24031163).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER110> ironic that the first block talks about aesthetics but the text literally does not meet the acceptable contrast ratio. I do like the rest of it, though.

</comment><comment><USER111> Rule number 21: Site should still work with JS disabled.

</comment><comment><USER112> Another "expertsexchange" style domain name!

</comment><comment><USER112> Jakobs law: Yellow on white is impossible to read.

</comment><comment><USER113> You have twenty things to say, and your site only shows one thing per screen regardless of the size of my window. Apparently you think a PowerPoint deck is the pinnacle of UX?

</comment><comment><USER114> nice compilation!

is anyone else bothered that they have to scroll below the fold after clicking "learn more" to get to the content?

</comment><comment><USER115> The law says "make all applications and programs accessible, aesthetic, intuitive, and user friendly" but I think I see alotta engineers out here.

</comment><comment><USER116> Interesting how the law count here seems to have ballooned to double of what it was a few years ago when this link was on the front page before.

</comment><comment><USER117> Doherty didn't go far enough.

</comment><comment><USER118> I love the design on this site.

</comment><comment><USER119> it took me a while to find the arrow get to the explanation....

</comment><comment><USER120> What about Cole's Law?

</comment><comment><USER121> Great

</comment><comment><USER122> That's a lot of named laws!

</comment><comment><USER123> It's a pretty site, don't get me wrong, but which law suggests presenting lists of obscurely named concepts as fullscreen shape art where I have to click one by one to read the list?</comment>


Ask HN: Transition to working at a VC firm - worth it? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a product manager quite involved with the Bay Area startup community, and have been recently approached by a recruiter from a VC firm regarding an opening for a senior associate.<p>Has anyone from the Hacker News community made a transition to a VC firm?  I'd be really interested in getting feedback on what it's really like being an associate, if you miss working directly on a product, etc. <comment><USER2> In addition to the above, I'd think about the situation of the VC industry and the firm in question (particularly where they are in their investment cycle(s)). For a variety of reasons, including the post-SarBox near No Exit issue, a lot of people are expecting a severe contraction in the industry.</comment>


Ajaxian: HTML5 Canvas Benchmarks - <AUTHOR> http://ajaxian.com/archives/canvas-benchmark

<comment><USER2> The chart makes Chrome _look_ really impressive, but ~7.9fps is still not that great.</comment>


Ask HN: What YC winter 2011 aspirants should not be doing right now? - <AUTHOR>

We are hacking on code, adding features, everything we were doing as usual. What else we should be doing ? <comment><USER2> Be talking to customers and building a list of interested people to launch to. You remove a lot of risk for YC if you walk into the interview room and say, "We have 25,000 email addresses for people who want our product". (aside, if you launch successfully that also reduces risk!).

Learn about the market. How do your competitors find users/customers affordably?

Learn about the competition. What are they doing well? What do people hate about their offering?

Learn about your users! Surveys, lunches, etc. If your product isn't something that you yourselves would use, you should spend a lot of time with potential customers.

Learn how to talk about your product. Test headlines, stumbleupon landing pages, adwords ads-- whatever it takes to learn that people respond more to "Nice juicy steak" more than they respond to "Muscle tissue sample of a castrated bull" (hat tip to Robert Heinlein).

In other words, pre-launch marketing (research, understanding, outreach)!

<comment><USER3> I remember hearing that The Simpsons TV show used to have a writer's retreat.

The goal was to have a place and time where the show runner and the writers would spend a few days mulling over script ideas by their writers. They'd get away from the grind, away from distractions, away from the studio, so they could consider ideas on their merits and hear their young writers sketch out hazy early-stage story visions.

They say it worked well for them initially. They identified good ideas really early, and because they got involved early, while the ideas were still malleable, they could give guidance on what the valuable parts of the story were, and what to focus on; that helped the writer when he went away to work on the idea to turn it into a real script.

However, they stopped doing the story retreats. Why?

The reason a show runner gave was that eventually, the retreat became a formality.

People were coming in with a nearly-finished product. They were practicing their presentations to the show runners, pitching them. Sometimes they came in with whole scripts ready, or nearly-complete outlines or A stories.

Which is great. But now you don't need a retreat. If you're going to prepare all of that stuff on your own time anyway, okay ... just do that. If the idea looks like it merits a slot at all, and you have episode slots to fill, how do you turn down polished work? Of course, the beneficial effects of experienced and talented writers guiding a writer's promising first take disappeared. There was nothing to guide. Again, no reason to have the retreat.

It sounds like pitches to YC have become more polished, and that makes me wonder. (Of course, the parallels are pretty tenuous, it just got me thinking).

Clearly, PG and Company are going to enjoy that. It's hard to turn down done work. It's a good thing if you can pitch. I just hope, for the sake of the little future Reddits and Social Calendars out there, that pg, jessica and the gang are protected from the glare coming off that polish.

<comment><USER4> Brian Chesky's talk at Startup School covered a lot of this--Airbnb had launched more than once and made a couple of successful PR stunts before applying to YC, but YC was still a crucial ingredient in carrying them on to success.

Also, everyone who's gone through the YC interview process and written about it says that, if they had any intentions to pitch at all, they were quickly derailed by questions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> YC would be nice, but it certainly isn't the end of the world. Keep hacking, keep working, etc.

Too many startups equate being rejected from YC with failure. That's stupid.

<comment><USER6> Do many startups really do that? I haven't seen much evidence of that, actually.

<comment><USER7> In the chat room someone posted a few nights ago, there were more than a few people who hinted at that being the case for them and their companies. I'd consider any number > 0 to be "too many".

I guess they see validation from YC as an absolute guarantee that they'll reach their end goal, or even as the end goal itself. Really, it's neither. There's a mountain of evidence showing that startups face cold, dark, and lonely times whether they're big or small, YC-validated or obscure, well- funded or strapped for cash. If you can't survive without YC, you probably can't survive _with_ YC.

I've been rejected 2 or 3 times now, and I'm still going at it.

<comment><USER8> Any lessons you can share after your 2nd or 3rd time? What would you have done differently?

<comment><USER7> Don't apply while you're still in school, and don't apply late haha. Sorry, nothing too insightful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not worrying about whether or not you get accepted.

<comment><USER10> Looks like you're the only person who caught the _not_ in the title

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Have a plan B, C and D

ie. you should still be out raising money and doing everything else you need to do to grow your company.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm continuing my everyday routine of hacking away. Trying to out it out of my mind, honestly. If I get in, I get in. If I don't, then I don't. Won't stop my determination to build my product and company.

</comment><comment><USER13> A tiny % of applicants are going to get in and they've probably already reached out to the 5 or 10% they're considering.

So we should just be working away on our startups - YC would be great to have _but_ there's plenty of other paths to success.

<comment><USER10> Any actual information re: whether or not that's true?

<comment><USER14> It's not true, I haven't gotten an email yet!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sounds like you guys are doing the right thing ... I am doing the same personally, living and breathing my idea just like I was before YC and just like I will be after YC. Whether or not I am chosen I will continue to do just as I am today. Even if I get an interview I certainly will not change my routine simply for the sake of YC ... I should have a demo by the time the interviews come around and I will be happy to show it to the team if selected to do so.

So many people seem to look at YC as a do or die ordeal. Simply put, it is not ... It is a wonderful program for a number of great minds and startups, they will likely pass on more good applicants than they will accept, that is not to say the YC guys do not know what they are doing, they have presumably well over 1,000 applicants and only accept around 40 companies. If you get rejected and decide not to continue on your project you were probably not the kind of founder they were looking for in the first place.

Use YC as motivation for your project, not as a gauge for your company's success, that is not what is what meant to be.

Zach

</comment><comment><USER16> Don't sweat things that are out of your control. Unless and/or until you're invited to an interview, the YC process is out of your control. Just focus on your stuff, what you can have an effect on. Otherwise you're just creating stress that you don't need for yourself.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> would be interesting to know what pg would say ?</comment>


Apple Hires The Guy Who Hacked Together A Better iOS Notifications System - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/03/apple-hires-the-guy-who-hacked-together-a-better-ios-notifications-system/

<comment><USER2> The author of this article seems to be unfamiliar with the concept of an internship. Peter is an intern because he's still in college, not because of some mythical gauntlet that new Apple engineers have to run through before Steve himself hands them keys to the repos.

</comment><comment><USER3> Link to the actual article (OP can you change the link?):

[http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2011/06/03/apple-hires-the- guy-w...](http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2011/06/03/apple-hires-the-guy-who- hacked-together-a-better-ios-notifications-system/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks a bit like the notification system I've seen on an Android device (I can be wrong though). Personally I was more into this notification concept which was made by a Swedish designer: <http://vimeo.com/21208357>

<comment> user-id I like that one better too. Can't say I'm a fan of MobileNotifier, it's a change but not an improvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I talked to his brother in high school. Peter signed on with Apple months ago.

<comment><USER6> How long ago? Asking because notifications should be an huge part of the new iOS and it would make sense for him to have helped with iOS 5.

<comment><USER5> Q1 2011 after the Engadget story covering his work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If this is true, and if this is about his notification system... is there not a fine dose of irony in the fact that Apple hired a guy, because he made a product, that functioned only on jail broken phones, which Apple fights hard to prevent from existing.

<comment><USER8> I sometimes suspect them of not really minding jailbreaking that much. Sure, they want to make sure it's not widespread, and the constant treadmill of crack-and-patch is enough to keep the hoi polloi from trying it. It provides a useful escape valve for the types that would never be confined by jailbreaking anyway. You don't think they could make it harder to crack if they tried?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if this fellow wishes we'd all STFU about this already. At some point he seemed to realize that being cute is not the better part of discretion. If I had come across this, I wouldn't have spread the news around; he could find himself like the engineer who had the iPhone 4 stolen from him before this kid has a chance to prove his worth within the company.

<comment><USER10> What do you mean, he could end up like him? What do you think happened to that engineer?

<comment><USER11> Best not to talk about it in public, but let's just say Steve Jobs has another liver lined up, should he need one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Demonstrates humility on Apple's part.

</comment><comment><USER13> Oh man, have you checked out his app MobileNotifier? It looks pretty fantastic... I was tempted for a second to jailbreak.

</comment><comment><USER14> I have a feeling he hasn't really been hired by Apple yet.

</comment><comment><USER15> That's surprising though, Apple's usual ways is beating down the little guy.

That just seems like smart move to me. If you can't beat them, you hire them.

If it makes my notifications better, it's all better!

<comment><USER16> "Apple's usual ways is beating down the little guy."

Some sort of cognitive bias is probably at play here since Apple engineers are generally not allowed to publicly comment on most of their work while Arl-- the people who get screwed over by Apple tend to be more vocal.

<comment><USER17> It's called "availability bias", because certain examples are more 'available' than others.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anyone using a "no hands" setup for programming? - <AUTHOR> It sometimes happens that programmers lose the ability to use their hands due to accidents/illness. Has anyone here used / seen an efficient setup for programming (i.e. entering code in various languages) that works with voice recognition, perhaps combined with eye movement? Please share info (hardware/software/effective "typing" speed). I'm sure it can be implemented better than using standard voice recognition software and text editors. <comment><USER2> [This talk by Tavis Rudd]([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI)) about a system he used when his hands were afflicted with RSI is pretty interesting.

Not entirely a no-hands approach, but I can't seem to remember the developer who made his first app in the hospital by typing with one/two fingers. He wrote a blogpost about his process that was really inspiring.

<comment><USER3> Ever since I first saw that talk, I've been checking his github page to see if he's pushed his code yet. Not that I'm judging; if I had a dime for every project I totally intended to push to github "once I clean up the duct tape", and then didn't, I'd probably have, like, a dollar.

<comment><USER4> Other people have pushed source code to github so you can stop waiting.

[http://thespanishsite.com/public_html/org/ergo/programming_b...](http://thespanishsite.com/public_html/org/ergo/programming_by_voice.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Try Dasher [http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/](http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/)

It's been developed for people only having a "one dimensional" possibility for doing inputs, i.e. only can move an eye or one muscle.

Given a custom dictionary you can write quite fast, though I don't know how practical this would be for programming.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for posting this one ; I saw it a while ago and some more polished version as well. Seems like a good idea to play around with for touch screen.

<comment><USER7> What was the more polished version you saw? I've been really interested in Dasher for quite some time but the last time I looked it appeared to have stagnated in terms of progress

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is one that instantly comes to mind [http://pyvideo.org/video/1735/using- python-to-code-by-voice](http://pyvideo.org/video/1735/using-python-to-code- by-voice)

<comment><USER9> Any idea where the Dragonfly code is for those commands?

<comment><USER10> I think he used the python NLTK Kit. [http://www.nltk.org/](http://www.nltk.org/)

I don't think that Dragon Naturaly Speaking is the best NLP tool out there, it appears to me that Stanford's CoreNLP is much more accurate, albeit being a little slower and more ressource hungry due to Java I think.

EDIT OT: I've found this blog which might be helpful for people who try to keep up with assistive technology. [http://www.assistivetechnologyblog.com/](http://www.assistivetechnologyblog.com/)

I wish I knew what advancements they[1] made since 2012: [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120628164426.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120628164426.htm)

Journal Reference: [1] Bettina Sorger, Joel Reithler, Brigitte Dahmen, Rainer Goebel. A Real-Time fMRI-Based Spelling Device Immediately Enabling Robust Motor-Independent Communication. Current Biology, 2012; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2012.05.022

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My relative has no hands since birth, he types on keyboard with his feet. I think most people could learn it after some training.

<comment><USER12> A kid in my CS program at uni only has one hand and only has 3 fingers on that hand, he's a great programmer and only slightly slower than most people. Most of my time spent programming is actually reading and thinking, not typing, so this comes as little surprise.

<comment><USER13> Interesting, because sometimes I neglect all of my elementary school touch typing lessons and end up typing with only the index and middle finger of my right hand (but my full left hand). I'm still one of the faster typists among my friends.

<comment><USER14> I tend to just use my index finger on each hand unless I'm typing letters right next to each other. For example, in "other", I type the "o" with the middle finger of my right hand, the "t" with the index finger of my left hand, the "h" with the index finger of my right hand, the "e" with the middle finger of my left hand, and the "r" with a small movement of my left hand index finger. I hit the shift key with my ring finger or pinkie and the space key sometimes with my index finger and sometimes with my thumb depending on where my hands are.

I've been playing guitar for longer than I've been seriously typing and guitar places a heavy emphasis on efficiency of the movement of your hands and fingers. There are multiple ways to form a chord and multiple places on the fretboard to play a note, so you find the one way that is easiest to switch to quickly from your previous note/chord. I wonder if that influence has changed the way I type as I tend to slide my hands left and right along the keyboard depending on where I will be hitting the keys next.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> [http://www.looknohands.me/](http://www.looknohands.me/) This New Zealand designer has a great setup that works for her.

<comment><USER4> She's a web designer. For programming, you'll be using a much different interface. Although, it'd be cool if someone built an IDE that had more gesture support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Slightly Offtopic: Does anyone use/know of a system for "no eyes" (blind) programming? Does anyone know any blind developers?

<comment><USER16> This SO thread has some interesting answers: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you- progra...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-program-if- youre-blind)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'd hire a secretary and dictate whatever I want to do (not limited to typing: window switching, etc).

A sophisticated multi-monitor setup would help.

<comment><USER4> Not practical for most people, of course.

<comment><USER18> Might be interesting to set up some sort of system for pairing young healthy aspiring programmers with older more experienced programmers that have lost the use of their hands (or eyes, etc) such that the younger programmer could learn from the more experienced but disabled programmer while helping them get stuff done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hal Finney did when he was paralyzed from ALS. He used a makeshift arduino setup and a commercial system to control his chair and keyboard with his eyes somehow. [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.msg1643833#ms...](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.msg1643833#msg1643833)

</comment><comment><USER4> Here are some resources that I've gathered on programming by voice.

[http://thespanishsite.com/public_html/org/ergo/programming_b...](http://thespanishsite.com/public_html/org/ergo/programming_by_voice.html)

I haven't gotten around to setting up the Window's VM on my Mac and trying.

</comment><comment><USER20> There are some solutions if you can use one hand. Matias makes a (really super expensive) one-hand keyboard, and there's also software that allows you to mirror the keyboard in halves with a hotkey. I'm sure there are other options in that realm.

</comment><comment><USER21> Check this talk out: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI)

</comment><comment><USER22> Anybody used VimSpeak? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEBMlXRjhZY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEBMlXRjhZY)

<comment><USER23> Unfortunately its only for windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Not an answer, but a thought:

Code is really just a seraliazed AST. That tree structure should be modifiable with gestures / voice as much as any other tree structure.

<comment><USER25> You're not really exposed to the tree structure though, unless you're writing in Lisp.

<comment><USER24> Sure, and you'd have to expose the developer to that tree structure for this to happen.

You could take steps to make it look closer to the original serial data (eg, the DOM doesn't have opening and closing tags, but DevTools shows it that way because developers expect it). Or you could come up with a more efficient but less familiar form.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It seems as the requirement for no hands coding is quite high but there is only one dude doing that, and only on windows (or at least needing a VM)?</comment>


Using IcedCoffeescript to prevent callback headaches - <AUTHOR> http://coderwall.com/p/re6zqq

<comment><AUTHOR> The last example was pretty weak. I fixed the example to show multiple asynchronous function calls running in parallel.</comment>


Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/10/24/teacher-spends-two-days-as-a-student-and-is-shocked-at-what-she-learned/

<comment><USER3> I think this is part of the reason why programming/computer classes can be more engaging… since you're doing more than just sitting the entire time. (probably reading reddit, etc.)

<comment><USER4> That's not engaging, thats a distraction from the lesson. I hate having someone in front of me browsing reedit, 9gag or any entertaining stuff - <USER2> distracts me even if I don't care for the content.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Twitter: PageRank algo and, KMeans to cluster, discover 'who_to_follow' - <AUTHOR> http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/balaca/twitter_graph/blob/master/twitter_graph.ipynb

<comment><USER2> interesting outputs at end, but what could be the ways to improve clustering performance. e.g. in the clustering process output, VC firms and Data Science communities are evident while other clusters aren't as evident.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, I'm trying to understand how meaningfulness of Clusters in the graph improve as I change KMeans parameters. I'd appreciate more views from the community</comment></comment>