Laws of UX, 2nd Edition

Preface

This book had its origins in what felt at the time like the most arduous point of my design career, while I was working on a very challenging client project. From the beginning, there were several indications that it would be an exciting, albeit difficult, project: a relatively short timeline and a somewhat unfamiliar space, but a well-known brand and the chance to help design something that’d be seen by many across the world. These kinds of projects have always been my favorite because they are the ones that offer the most opportunity to learn and grow, which I’ve always striven to do. But this project was somewhat unique in one specific way: I was being asked to justify a number of design decisions to project stakeholders, without any data to support them. Normally, when you have quantitative or qualitative data available to draw upon, this is a pretty straightforward task—but in this case the data wasn’t available, so the process of justifying the decisions would have to be a little different. How do you validate initial designs without any proof that there is a need to change the existing designs to begin with? As you can imagine, design reviews quickly became a matter of subjectivity and personal bias, resulting in designs that were more difficult to validate.

Then it occurred to me: psychology, which provides a deeper understanding of the human mind, could be helpful in these circumstances. I quickly became immersed in the rich and expansive field of behavioral and ...