Laws of UX
30 psychology principles for interface decisions — but this URL does not resolve
Laws of UX is Jon Yablonski's collection of psychology and usability principles distilled into short, citable pages — Fitts's Law, Hick's Law, Jakob's Law, Miller's Law, the Gestalt laws of Proximity, Similarity, Common Region, Prägnanz and Uniform Connectedness, plus cognitive-bias entries such as the Aesthetic-Usability Effect, Peak-End Rule, Von Restorff Effect, Serial Position Effect, and Zeigarnik Effect. Each law gets a one-paragraph statement, takeaways, origin, and references, and the set is cross-tagged (gestalt, memory, cognitive-load, usability, attention) and translated into Arabic, Spanish, Persian, and French. Important: the hyphenated domain in this record has no DNS record at all — the live site is lawsofux.com. Content is CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, so it may be cited but not remixed or used commercially.
Do not fetch the URL on this record — laws-of-ux.com has no A or NS record and fails at DNS, so retry against lawsofux.com instead, where /en/sitemap.xml gives you all 30 law pages in one request. Reach for a specific law when you need to justify a layout decision to a human ('Jakob's Law' beats 'users expect this'), and pair it with the A11Y Project or WebAIM when the decision has a measurable rather than a rhetorical answer. Watch the licence: CC BY-NC-ND forbids derivatives, so quote and attribute, never paraphrase into your own reference page.
Why it is here. It gave the industry a shared shorthand for arguing about interface decisions from evidence rather than taste. Its value to an agent is rhetorical — the names carry weight in review that raw reasoning does not.
- 30 law pages, each with origin and references
- translated into 4 additional languages
- CC BY-NC-ND — no derivatives allowed
- the hyphenated domain in this record is dead
- companion O'Reilly book and poster
Verified 2026-08-16. https://laws-of-ux.com — DNS resolution failed twice (curl error 6, dig returns no A and no NS records). Content verified instead against the live canonical site: https://lawsofux.com/ (HTTP 200), https://lawsofux.com/laws/, https://lawsofux.com/sitemap.xml and https://lawsofux.com/en/sitemap.xml (30 law pages enumerated).
