As someone who started out as a graphic designer, I’ve trained myself to follow the Gestalt principles, particularly the Laws of Proximity, Similarity, and Closure in designing visual materials. Shifting to interaction design, I’ve begun to engage more in two other principles that are relatively new to me: The Laws of Common Fate and Past Experience. In the next few paragraphs, I’ll explain how I’ve utilized these two laws (plus Fitts’s Law) in the past and how I plan to incorporate them in my future work.
The Law of Common Fate becomes a powerful principle for visual feedback in the form of microinteractions and motion design. This is something that I had not consciously included in my previous work, but thinking about it now, I definitely relied on this principle before to assemble composite elements such as a menu. For instance, when a menu expands or collapses, the synchronized motion of the smaller items signals that they are a unified group (though I should mention that it definitely helps that they are in close proximity and that they are bound in a box). In webpages, when appropriate, I make a sticky panel while the rest of the page moves the same direction the user is scrolling. Both examples demonstrate how motion communicates relationships, and I plan to deliberately use this idea to strengthen my current practice in designing menus, panels, and other interactive elements with motion at the foreground, guiding users’ attention to their object of interest and providing more dynamic cues.
As for the Law of Past Experience, the way I see it is that it has some overlaps with mental models and the phrase “Recognition over recall”. While they conceptually differ and draw from different aspects of human cognition, what these all have in common is leveraging familiar patterns committed in human memory to design a product that is easily digestible. There are, however, some instances where some patterns need to be broken, perhaps in products whose brand strategy relies on memorable, unique, unconventional, and/or innovative experiences. I think adding these concepts to our designer toolkit equips us to be flexible and discerning enough to follow established standards wherever critical, such as accessible design.
Besides these two Gestalt principles, I’d like to introduce Fitts’s Law into my designer brain library. Similar to the Law of Common Fate, I have interacted with some interfaces that align and not align with this model. I currently work as a Web Quality Assurance Tester, and I sometimes come across buttons that do not function as expected. An instance that I could think of was when I tested a button that only worked when I pressed on the text inside the container. Another instance that directly fits into what the model is trying to say is when I tested a card whose target area was smaller than its dimensions. Moving forward, knowing what I know now, I can communicate more clearly as to why instances like these must be flagged as “QA Failed” and advocate for element properties that have an objective, solid justification.
Following the Gestalt Principles and Fitts’s Law underpins accessible design and usability. There is a dependency between these principles in that if a set of elements do not function well or at all, the users encounter an issue with ease-of-use and can potentially become disadvantaged in more ways than one. These disadvantages may include cognitive, sensory, and motor disadvantages, among many others.