◉LAWSOFUX · motion lab
Lab notebook · 2026-04-30 · ShurAI

Thirty cognitive heuristics, rendered as motion — and given to an agent.

A working catalog of the Laws of UX, recreated as inline animated SVG and as Cavalry scenes the agent can run through a Stallion bridge. Each entry pairs the verified production cadence with a ShurIQ reading: how the heuristic earns its keep inside a regulatory-grade brand intelligence brief.

Single-form composition

Aesthetic-Usability Effect

Polished visuals raise the user's perceived usability of an interface, even when the underlying flow has friction.

Grid stagger reveal

Choice Overload

When a user faces too many simultaneous options, decision quality collapses and the user disengages or defers.

Grid stagger reveal

Chunking

Information becomes scannable when it is split into small, semantically coherent units that the eye can process as one shape.

Center-out radial pulse

Cognitive Bias

Judgment routinely departs from rational expected-value reasoning because the brain runs heuristics to conserve effort.

Single-form composition

Cognitive Load

Every interface charges a mental tax on the user, and there is a fixed budget per session.

Center-out radial pulse

Doherty Threshold

A system that responds to a user inside roughly 400 milliseconds keeps the user engaged; slower than that and the user disengages, multitasks, or drops the sess

Center-out radial pulse

Fitts's Law

The time it takes a user to hit a target scales with how far the cursor must travel and how small the target is.

Square / diamond inflate

Flow

Flow is the absorbed working state where challenge and skill are matched and the user loses track of friction.

Opacity-stepped bands

Goal-Gradient Effect

Effort accelerates as a perceived goal gets closer.

Grid stagger reveal

Hick's Law

The time required to make a decision grows logarithmically with the number of options.

Single-form composition

Jakob's Law

Users arrive at every new interface carrying expectations from every other interface they already use.

Grid stagger reveal

Law of Common Region

Elements enclosed inside a shared boundary are read as belonging together, regardless of their visual similarity.

Grid stagger reveal

Law of Proximity

Items placed near one another are read as related.

Single-form composition

Law of Prägnanz

The eye resolves complex shapes into the simplest interpretation it can construct.

Grid stagger reveal

Law of Similarity

Visually similar elements are perceived as members of the same group — even when separated by space, content, or time.

Center-out radial pulse

Law of Uniform Connectedness

Elements joined by a visible connector — line, arrow, frame, ribbon — read as more strongly related than elements that are merely near or similar.

Single-form composition

Mental Model

Each user carries a compressed internal model of how a system works, built from prior experience with similar systems.

Grid stagger reveal

Miller's Law

Working memory holds about 7±2 discrete items at once, and the number contracts under stress, fatigue, or context-switching.

Single-form composition

Occam's Razor

Among solutions that perform equally well, choose the one with the fewest moving parts.

Single-form composition

Paradox of the Active User

Users skip the documentation and start using the product immediately, even when reading the manual would save them time.

Grid stagger reveal

Pareto Principle

A small fraction of inputs typically generates the majority of the outputs — roughly 80% of effects from 20% of causes.

Square / diamond inflate

Parkinson's Law

Any task expands to fill the time the user expects to spend on it.

Grid stagger reveal

Peak-End Rule

An experience is remembered by its emotional peak and its final moment, not by its average.

Opacity-stepped bands

Postel's Law

Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send.

Center-out radial pulse

Selective Attention

The brain narrows its perceptual focus to a subset of incoming signals — usually the ones aligned with current goals — and filters out the rest.

Sequential reveal then dim

Serial Position Effect

Items at the start and end of a sequence are remembered better than items in the middle.

Single-form composition

Tesler's Law

Every system has a floor of complexity that cannot be designed away — it can only be moved.

Grid stagger reveal

Von Restorff Effect

An item that visually departs from its peers is remembered better than any of the peers.

Opacity-stepped bands

Working Memory

A short-term cognitive workspace that holds 4 to 7 items at a time, each fading after roughly 20–30 seconds without rehearsal.

Opacity-stepped bands

Zeigarnik Effect

Unfinished tasks linger in memory more vividly than completed ones — the brain holds open loops and pushes the user to close them.