From the course: Interaction Design: Design Patterns as Building Blocks

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Fitts's law, grouping, and cognitive load

Fitts's law, grouping, and cognitive load

From the course: Interaction Design: Design Patterns as Building Blocks

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Fitts's law, grouping, and cognitive load

- There's some foundational concepts in UX that are rooted in psychology. The first is Fitts's Law. Fitts's Law is the psychological principle behind how long it takes your hand to travel to an object, and how the size of the target influences that time frame. Let's take a look at what that means. In this very simplified example, if you were trying to use your mouse to travel from the bottom right corner and click on one of these squares, you'll find that it's more difficult to click on the smaller object because of its small size and how far it is from where your mouse was. The larger object would be easier to click, because it's bigger and it's closer to where your cursor was. We take this principle into consideration when we design interfaces, because we need to ensure our targets our big enough for users to interact with while reducing errors. A small example of this is using a primary button for stronger calls to action…

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