Web Design
Intro + Principles 4 & 5: Hick's Law & Fitt's Law
To Do:
- Create a Working Document for notes on design principles
- As you watch the videos in these ePortfolio Design Quests, and then read the material, make notes to yourself about what is and is not working in your ePortfolio design.
- You will be sharing this in one or more of our F2F sessions.
Hick's Law & Fitt's Law
Hick's Law
Hick’s law states that ‘every additional choice increases the time required to take a decision.‘ This law does not only hold true for web design but also in a number of other situations and settings. For example, if you visit a restaurant and are provided with too many food items to pick from, you will take a longer time to take a decision. As far as web designing is concerned, the more options you offer to your visitors, the more difficult will the website become to use and browse through. This means that we need to reduce the number of choices in order to provide a better user experience.
On the other hand, if your site is complex and is robust in content, too few choices means that you are requiring your audience to "drill down" through several categories of content with clicks to arrive at their destination. If you can keep the number of clicks required to arrive at desired content to three clicks, then you are striking a fine balance between few choices and too many clicks.
What about your site:
Does your site have enough choices to make for ease of finding information but not so few choices that the audience has to click several times to find what they want.
Fitt's Law
Proximity & Size of Linked Features
"The basic idea in Fitts's Law is that any time a person uses a mouse to move the mouse pointer, certain characteristics of objects on the screen make them easy or hard to click on. The farther the person has to move the mouse to get to an object, the more effort it will take to get to. The smaller the object is, the harder it will be to click on. Pretty simple, right? It means that the easiest objects to locate and target are the ones closest to the mouse's current position and that have large target spaces... The worst possible object is one that is very far away from the current position of the cursor, and very small in size." Microsoft Developer Network (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms993291.aspx)
"If you want your website visitors to take actions like order a product, read about a service or click on something, then you must make sure that they can reach the ‘click here’ more easily and quickly. Thus, it is a good idea to consider this law and use it well."
An article by Martin Luenendonk for Entrepreneurial Insights (June 3, 2015) with permission from the author. (http://www.entrepreneurial-insights.com/web-design-principles-successful-websites/).
What about your site:
Does your site make it easy to reach and click on items?
