Laws of UX

familiarity over novelty

If behavior can be shaped by technology, who holds the companies that build technology to account for the decisions they make?

In other words, we should build technology that augments the human experience rather than replacing it with virtual interaction and rewards.

The first and easiest way to internalize the principles discussed in this book is to make them visible in your working space.

Show-and-Tell

Skinner demonstrated that random reinforcement on a variable schedule is the most effective way to influence behavior.

Default settings matter when it comes to choice architecture because most people never change them.

An example of Amazon’s now-deprecated Dash button (source: Amazon, 2019)

It appears that the mere presence of our smartphones reduces our available cognitive capacity, even when the devices are turned off

The email cannot be sent if either of these is missing, and therefore it’s a necessary complexity. To reduce this complexity, a modern email client will do two things: prepopulate the sender (it can do this because it is aware of your email address), and provide suggestions for the recipient as you begin to type their address, based on prior emails and/or your contacts (Figure 9-1). The complexity isn’t entirely gone; it’s just abstracted away to reduce the effort required of the user. In other words, the experience of writing an email is made a little simpler by moving the complexity of filling in the sender’s and, if possible, the recipient’s address to the email client, which was designed and developed by a team that assumed that burden of complexity when building it.