UX Laws Explained with Examples: Fitts, Hick, Jakob and Miller

You’re at the bus stop, the bus is already turning the corner, and you want to quickly buy a ticket in your local transit app. The app opens with a list of 14 fares. Which fare zone you need is shown on a map hidden in another menu. To reach the Buy button, you have to stretch your thumb all the way to the top right corner, and the menu doesn’t open with the usual icon but with a swipe gesture you have to discover first. The bus pulls away. You’re still standing there.

This app is made up, but every single problem in it is typical. And each one has an explanation with a name in the UX world: Fitts’s Law, Hick’s Law, Jakob’s Law and Miller’s Law. These four are among the best known so-called UX laws. Once you know them, you’ll spot many weaknesses in an interface faster and find it easier to explain to your team why something should change.

This article explains all four laws without assuming any prior knowledge, each with an everyday example and a before and after example from the ticket app. At the end, you’ll see how the laws work together, where they contradict each other and how to use them as a review tool in your daily work.

What a “UX law” actually is

The word “law” sounds stricter than it is. UX laws aren’t regulations, and they aren’t laws of nature like gravity either. They’re observations from psychology and usability research that describe how people perceive, decide and move. Some of them come from lab experiments in the 1950s, long before smartphones existed.

The four laws in this article differ in kind:

• Fitts’s Law and Hick’s Law are formulas from experimental psychology. They describe measurable relationships, for example between the size of a target and the time it takes you to hit it.
• Miller’s Law goes back to a paper on the limits of memory. The famous number from it is often misunderstood, more on that later.
• Jakob’s Law isn’t a lab formula but a principle from practice, put into words by a usability expert.

In UX design, these rules became widely known mainly through collections such as Laws of UX by Jon Yablonski. As a beginner, one mindset matters most: the laws help you spot problems and back up your ideas. They don’t replace testing with real people.

Fitts’s Law: big, close targets are faster to hit

Fitts’s Law describes how long it takes to reach a target with a movement. In short: the bigger a target is and the closer it is, the faster and more accurately you hit it. The smaller and further away, the longer it takes and the more often you miss.

The American psychologist Paul Fitts published the law in 1954. In his experiments, people used a stylus to tap back and forth between two target areas as fast as they could, while he varied the size of the targets and the distance between them. From this, he derived a formula. You don’t need to be able to calculate it. It’s enough to know the principle: the time depends on the ratio between distance and target size, and it grows more slowly than the distance itself. Twice as far doesn’t mean twice as long.

In everyday life

Think of a light switch. A typical switch sits right next to the door at about hip height and is big enough to hit with the flat of your hand in the dark. Now imagine it were a tiny button in the far corner of the room instead. You’d be fumbling across the room every time. That difference between “big and close” and “small and far away” is what Fitts’s Law is about.

In the interface

On screens, the targets are buttons, links, icons and form fields. Depending on the device, you move a mouse or a finger.

Before: In the ticket app, the Buy button is a small text link in the top right corner, right next to “Cancel”. Anyone holding the phone in one hand has to shift their grip, and a mistap cancels the purchase.

After: At the bottom of the screen, in the area your thumb reaches easily, there’s a full width “Buy ticket” button. “Cancel” is a text link placed above it with clear spacing. The main action is big and close, while the action that ends the process is deliberately a little further away.

How big is big enough? The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 require at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels at level AA in success criterion 2.5.8, or enough spacing from other targets. Apple recommends at least 44 by 44 points for touch targets, Android at least 48 by 48 dp (a device independent unit). The tappable area can be larger than the visible icon, for example through padding.

A common misconception

Fitts’s Law doesn’t mean everything should be huge. If every button is the same size, none of them stands out. Big and close belongs to the actions people need most often. A second point concerns screen edges: with a mouse, they act like infinitely large targets because the pointer simply stops there. The Nielsen Norman Group points out that this advantage doesn’t apply to touchscreens. An icon right at the edge of a smartphone screen isn’t automatically easy to hit.

Hick’s Law: more choices, longer decisions

Hick’s Law describes how a decision takes longer the more equally likely options there are to choose from. It’s named after the British psychologist William Edmund Hick (1952) and the American psychologist Ray Hyman (1953), which is why it’s also called the Hick-Hyman law. In Hick’s experiment, ten lamps were arranged in a circle, each linked to its own key. When a lamp lit up, the participant had to press the matching key as fast as possible. The more lamps were in play, the longer the reaction took.

The interesting part: the time doesn’t grow at the same rate as the number of options, but much more slowly. Mathematically, it rises logarithmically. Going from two to four options adds noticeable thinking time, going from 20 to 22 barely any.

In everyday life

Picture a food delivery menu that lists 80 dishes one below the other without any categories. You scroll, compare, scroll back. A menu with the same 80 dishes, but sorted into pizza, pasta, salads and desserts, feels much shorter. You pick the category first and then choose among a handful of dishes. The number of options is the same, the effort isn’t.

In the interface

Before: Right after opening, the ticket app shows 14 fares side by side: single ticket, short trip, four trip ticket, day pass for one to five people, weekly and monthly passes, bike ticket, extension ticket and a few more. Occasional riders don’t understand the differences and get stuck in front of the list.

After: The app first asks “Where are you going?” and then suggests the right ticket, for example “Single ticket, 2 zones”. Below it are two alternatives that are often cheaper, such as the day pass if a return trip makes it worthwhile. All other fares sit under “More tickets”. No fare has disappeared, but most people now only make one small decision.

A common misconception

Hick’s Law is often used as an argument for “as few options as possible”. That falls short. The logarithmic relationship mainly applies when people already know the options and can place them quickly. With an unsorted list of unfamiliar items, they have to read every entry one by one, and the effort grows with each item. So the solution is often not cutting but organizing: group, sort sensibly, highlight a recommendation. If you cut or hide too much, you force people to dig for content in deeper menu levels.

Jakob’s Law: people expect what they already know

Jakob’s Law comes from Jakob Nielsen, one of the best known usability experts and co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group. He formulated the idea in 2000. In essence: people spend most of their time on websites other than yours. That’s why they expect your website to work like the ones they already know. In Nielsen’s own words: “users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”

Behind this is what’s called a mental model: the internal picture people have of how something works. Anyone who has used a hundred online shops expects the cart in the top right corner and a logo that leads back to the homepage. These expectations aren’t laws of nature but learned patterns, known as conventions.

In everyday life

You walk into a supermarket you’ve never been to. Still, you find your way around quickly: carts at the entrance, fruit and vegetables usually up front, fridges along the wall, checkouts by the exit. If the checkouts were in the middle of the store and the carts in the stockroom, you’d still manage to shop eventually, but with a lot more searching and asking. You didn’t do anything wrong. The store just didn’t meet the expectations you’ve learned.

In the interface

Before: The ticket app has no visible navigation. Purchased tickets, timetable and settings can only be reached with a swipe from the left edge, and nothing hints at it. When an inspector checks tickets, people frantically search for theirs.

After: There’s a navigation bar at the bottom with four labeled icons: “Buy ticket”, “My tickets”, “Timetable”, “Account”. It’s a pattern many people know from other apps. On top of that, the valid ticket appears right on the home screen for as long as it’s valid.

A common misconception

Jakob’s Law doesn’t forbid anything new, and it isn’t a call to blindly copy your competitors. It means familiar patterns are the default, and any departure needs a good reason. A new pattern is worth it when it works clearly better, not when it just looks a bit different. Also pay attention to which conventions your audience actually knows. People who mainly use iPhones have partly different expectations from people who use Android, and accounting software follows different patterns than a social media app. The most reliable way to find out whether a departure works is a usability test.

Miller’s Law: memory is small

Miller’s Law goes back to the psychologist George A. Miller. His 1956 paper is titled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two”. In it, he describes how people can only hold about seven items in short-term memory (the store for what you’re keeping in mind right now) at once, plus or minus two.

Later research paints an even stricter picture. In a widely cited review from 2001, the psychologist Nelson Cowan concluded that the limit is closer to about four items on average. In practice, the exact number matters less than the message: your in-the-moment memory is small and fills up quickly. How this relates to working memory and the mental effort an interface demands is covered in depth in the article Cognitive Load: Why Less Is Often More in Interface Design.

An important concept from Miller’s work is chunking: information is grouped into meaningful pieces (chunks) that can be remembered as a single unit. For most people, “2026” is one chunk, not four separate digits.

In everyday life

You want to connect to the Wi-Fi at a friend’s place. The password is on the back of the router in the hallway, 20 characters without spaces. You read it, walk to the laptop in the living room and, after the first five characters, forget how it continues. So you walk back and forth two or three times. If the password is instead written on a note next to the laptop in groups of five, the problem is solved: first, you don’t have to remember anything, and second, the groups make it easier to check.

In the interface

Before: When buying a ticket, the app asks for the fare zone. Which zone you need is shown on a zone map in a different menu. You open the map, look up your start and destination, remember “zone 3”, go back to the purchase and are no longer sure whether it was zone 4 after all.

After: The app calculates the zone automatically from start and destination. Before payment, a short summary shows everything at a glance: “Single ticket, Central Station to University Campus, 2 zones, valid for 90 minutes, €3.40”. Nobody has to remember anything from one screen to the next.

A common misconception

The best known misunderstanding is: “A menu can have no more than seven items.” Miller’s work doesn’t support that. The limit applies to things you have to keep in your head without seeing them. A menu, however, is visible on the screen. Jakob Nielsen explicitly calls the seven item rule for menus a misconception: longer menus are fine if needed, because nobody has to memorize them. Miller’s Law matters where people have to carry information across several steps: codes, numbers, zones, prices from a previous page.

How the four laws work together

In real interfaces, the laws rarely show up on their own. The ticket app shows this well: after the redesign, it opens with familiar navigation (Jakob), asks for the destination and suggests a ticket (Hick), calculates the zone itself and shows a summary (Miller), and ends with a big Buy button in thumb reach (Fitts). A purchase that could previously fail at the bus stop now takes three taps.

Sometimes, though, the laws pull in different directions. Two tensions come up often in practice:

Fitts versus Hick. Big buttons take up space. If you want to show ten options at a large size, you quickly end up with a long page or a crowded screen. The usual solution: the one main action gets the big area, while rarely used options become smaller or move one level down. Check that the deeper level is still easy to find, otherwise you’re trading a quick decision for a long search.

Jakob versus good ideas. Sometimes a convention is worse than a new solution. One simple question helps: is the new approach so much better that it justifies the learning effort? If you can’t answer that with a clear yes, stick with the familiar. If you can, test the idea before it goes live.

How to use the laws in your work

Especially at the start, it’s tempting to treat UX laws like a rulebook. It’s more useful to turn them into questions you ask of a screen. A quick pass with four questions works for wireframes, mockups and finished pages alike:

1. Fitts: Is the most important action big enough and where the mouse or thumb already is? Are risky actions far enough away from frequent ones?
2. Hick: How many decisions does someone have to make at this point? Are the options organized, and is there a sensible recommendation?
3. Jakob: Do navigation, icons and gestures work the way your audience knows from other products? Where do you depart from that, and why?
4. Miller: Does anyone have to remember something from one step to the next? Could the system show or handle that information instead?

These questions don’t replace research, but they help you spot issues early. For a more thorough review, Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics are a good fit and pick up many of the same ideas.

In a team, UX laws also make a good basis for discussion. “The button should be bigger” sounds like a matter of taste. “According to Fitts’s Law, a small target at the edge is harder to hit, and this is the most important action on the whole screen” is an argument. Just make sure you don’t use the law as the final word. When in doubt, a quick test with five people from your audience settles more than any formula.

Conclusion

Fitts’s Law, Hick’s Law, Jakob’s Law and Miller’s Law describe four basic traits of people using an interface: they hit big, close targets more easily, they decide faster when choices are organized, they expect the familiar, and they can only keep a little in mind at once. None of these laws is a rigid rule. Together, though, they give you a way of looking at screens that helps you catch many problems before they leave people stranded at the bus stop.

To get started, it’s enough to internalize the four core ideas and know the common misconceptions: don’t make everything big, don’t cut blindly, don’t copy blindly and don’t trim menus to seven items. If you want to go deeper, the Laws of UX collection covers many more principles, and the glossary entries for each of the four laws offer further examples.

Checklist

• The most important action on each screen is the biggest and easiest target to reach.
• Touch targets are at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels, ideally 44 by 44.
• Risky actions such as “Delete” or “Cancel” aren’t placed right next to frequent actions.
• Long lists of options are grouped and sorted, with a sensible recommendation highlighted.
• Navigation, icons and gestures follow patterns your audience knows.
• Every departure from a convention has a clear reason and has been tested.
• Nobody has to remember information from one step to the next.
• Long numbers and codes are broken into groups.

Sources

• Paul M. Fitts (1954): The Information Capacity of the Human Motor System in Controlling the Amplitude of Movement. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 47(6)
• Raluca Budiu: Fitts’s Law and Its Applications in UX. Nielsen Norman Group, 2022
• W3C: Understanding Success Criterion 2.5.8: Target Size (Minimum)
• Apple: Human Interface Guidelines, Buttons
• Android Developers: Make apps more accessible
• W. E. Hick (1952): On the Rate of Gain of Information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 4(1)
• Ray Hyman (1953): Stimulus Information as a Determinant of Reaction Time. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 45(3)
• Wikipedia: Hick’s law
• Jakob Nielsen: End of Web Design. Nielsen Norman Group, 2000
• George A. Miller (1956): The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. Psychological Review, 63(2)
• Nelson Cowan (2001): The magical number 4 in short-term memory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1)
• Jakob Nielsen: Short-Term Memory and Web Usability. Nielsen Norman Group, 2009
• Jon Yablonski: Laws of UX