Laws of UX

30 psychology principles for interface decisions — but this URL does not resolve

Tier B · UsefulReferenceArticlelawsofux.com

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.

For an agent

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.

Install command, framework, licence and component list.

Facts

License: CC BY-NC
Pricing: Free, One-time purchase
Framework: Not applicable
Styling: Not applicable
Distribution: Article, thread, or post
Platform: Web
Content type: Prose / writing
Agent readiness: No agent surface
Accessibility: Unknown
Maturity: Dead link
Pricing detail: Site free. Companion book 'Laws of UX' (O'Reilly) and a large-format index poster and card deck sold via jonyablonski.bigcartel.com; prices not listed on the site itself.

Notable for

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

Provenance

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).

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lawsofux.comTier B