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Comment by yoz-y | Hacker News Reader

After all the criticism here I took a shot of paraphrasing the website in a page length post: https://yozy.net/2018/01/10-laws-of-ux-digested/

A kind of an opinionated tl;dr

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Honestly, just make it into a bullet point list: your reformulation of the ideas is WAY clearer and requires no additional explanations. Maybe add graphical examples if you must, but referring back to the text of the original site actually makes yours worse.

Thank you. I wanted to keep parts of the original mainly because I have merely interpreted the rules, however the work of compiling them, finding the links and so on was done by the original author(s).

I love that. It could be simplified further, true, but IMO this is good enough.

I particularly love what you did with the titles - practical advice, each backed by the appropriate "law", reads nicely and forms a clear picture in my head.

That's how it should have been done with decent UX. Simple and easy to read.

I agree with all your interpretations except for #4, I think it's the opposite, if something is ambiguous then you need to add detail to clarify it, and you can present a lot of information at once as long as the representation is consistent.

Having lots of detail is not equivalent to being complex.

I would agree. I think the real rule #4 is "Take greater care when presenting detailed or complex information. The presentation will often speak louder than the information."

For this one I dig into the linked articles because I think that the “law” itself is not exactly actionable. As a matter of fact it actually concentrated on logo design. The way I interpreted it for interface design is that if you need to present a lot of detail, you need to give it appropriate space. For example if you have a graph with many curves on it, people will be able to see the general trend but they will not be able to make out individual differences.

Do put leading zeros on numbers that are sorted as text.

How many?

9. Removing features from your product may result in users not being able to achieve some goals

Ie removing the leading zero breaks some sorting (Eg .mp3 files on an album where you know the number of tracks and hence how many leading 0s you need)

This is a problem of the sorting algorithm

Far too many sorting algorithms would have 10 come after 1 but before 2. Those programmers need to be flogged until they see the error of their way.

My remark was a jab at the fact that the list on the original website had leading zeros for no reason. I am not talking about naming files but about displaying information to humans.

In the case of music, leading zeros on files are useful for sorting. But the music player should not use file names for sorting but track numbers, and display them without leading zeros in the interface.

Your interpretation helped me understand most of the laws.

I hope mods replaces yours with the original.

Thanks.

Excellent. Add some examples of good/bad use of each law and you’d have a fantastic resource.

Great digest, thank you! Respecting the original poster (and his/her previous not-so-fruitful-reposts the previous days), I like your wording more and I suggest anyone that finds this topic interesting to have a read to your digest.

For Hick's law, if there are many options and your user knows what they are looking for by name, sort!

> your user knows what they are looking for by name

There's also CTRL+F in the browser. For the love of all that is holy, don't break it.

And please, don't break / either. Github and docs.python.org for instance don't play nice for vim users.

You don't have the posters.

awesome, and nicely done on the "bonus law"!

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