Laws of UX

Calling this a course is a stretch, and it's worth saying so plainly. Laws of UX is a reference collection — around thirty psychological and design principles, each with its own page explaining the idea, where it came from, and how it applies to interface work. There's no sequence, no exercises, no completion.

What it is instead is one of the most useful bookmarks in design. Jon Yablonski assembled the principles that designers cite constantly and gave each one a clean, well-designed page, which for a site about design is table stakes and still rarer than you'd hope.

What's in the collection

The familiar heavyweights are all here: Fitts's Law, Hick's Law, Jakob's Law, Miller's Law, Occam's Razor, the Pareto Principle, Tesler's Law. So are the Gestalt principles — common region, proximity, similarity, prägnanz, uniform connectedness. And the memory and attention material: cognitive load, working memory, selective attention, the serial position effect, the Von Restorff effect, the Zeigarnik effect, the peak-end rule. Choice overload, chunking, the Doherty threshold, the goal-gradient effect, flow, mental models, Postel's Law and the paradox of the active user round it out.

Where a principle collection misleads

Design laws are heuristics dressed as laws, and a list format encourages treating them as rules to apply rather than tensions to balance. Hick's Law says reduce choices; the paradox of the active user says people won't read your onboarding. Both are true, both are relevant to the same screen, and the site doesn't help you work out which wins. Nor does it show you a real interface being critiqued. You leave with vocabulary, which is genuinely useful in a design review, and no method for making a decision — and the vocabulary can be used to justify almost any choice after the fact.

Who it's for

Developers who end up making design calls without a designer, product managers who want to argue more precisely, and junior designers building a working vocabulary. Reading it end to end takes under two hours. Skip it if you want to learn to design — you need critique, iteration and someone telling you your spacing is wrong, none of which a reference site provides. Skip it too if you already have design training; almost none of this will be new.

Our take

Beautifully made, genuinely handy, and not a course. There's also a paid book if you want the material offline, which is fair enough. Treat it as a glossary you consult while looking at a real screen rather than something to work through, and be sceptical of anyone — including yourself — who cites a law to settle an argument.