A
HCI researcher who, with Shumin Zhai, derived the steering law in 1997 — how speed and error change when a pointer must travel a constrained path.
Appears in Steering Law
Wired editor whose Long Tail argued the unpopular 80 percent becomes a market once serving it gets cheap.
Appears in Pareto Principle
Behavioral economist and author of Predictably Irrational whose experiments — including assembling IKEA boxes — showed how effort inflates the value of what we build.
Appears in IKEA Effect
Newspaper design scholar who systematized reading gravity — how attention falls diagonally across an evenly weighted page.
Appears in Gutenberg Principle
B
Cognitive neuroscientist whose 2006 experiments with Maital Neta showed people prefer curved objects at a glance — sharp contours read as threat before thought begins.
Appears in Contour Bias
Inventor of the web and W3C director, whose line “the power of the web is in its universality” opens the accessibility case.
Appears in WCAG and POUR
Author of The Mythical Man-Month, who named Conway’s Law and gave software engineering its most quoted warnings.
Appears in Conway’s Law
Cognitive psychologist who co-founded the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies with George Miller in 1960.
Appears in Miller’s Law
C
English writer whose 1929 parable of the fence became the engineering rule: understand it before you remove it.
Appears in Chesterton’s Fence
Information scientist whose training-wheels interfaces at IBM proved that hiding advanced functions helps novices learn.
Appears in Progressive Disclosure
Behavioral economist who co-coined the curse of knowledge in 1989 — better-informed people can’t ignore what they know.
Appears in Curse of Knowledge
Social scientist whose 1976 law described how quantitative indicators corrupt the processes they monitor.
Appears in Goodhart’s Law
Computer scientist whose 1968 observation that systems mirror the organizations that build them became Conway’s Law.
Appears in Conway’s Law
Psychologist who named flow — the state of full absorption that sits at the top of the Yerkes-Dodson curve.
Appears in Yerkes-Dodson Law
D
Psychologist who, with Robert Yerkes, showed in 1908 that performance peaks at moderate arousal and collapses past it.
Appears in Yerkes-Dodson Law
IBM researcher whose 1982 work on the economic value of rapid response time showed productivity soaring when systems answer in under 400 milliseconds.
Appears in Doherty Threshold
E
Founder of experimental memory research — the serial position effect, the forgetting curve, and the spacing effect all trace to his 1880s work.
Appears in Serial Position Effect
Expertise researcher whose deliberate-practice work explains why not all repetitions bend the learning curve equally.
Appears in Power Law of Practice
Author of Hooked and Indistractable, who packaged habit formation into the four-step trigger-action-reward-investment loop.
Appears in Hook Model
F
Physicist and philosopher who gave Weber’s observation its mathematical form, founding psychophysics in 1860.
Appears in Weber-Fechner Law
Air Force human-factors pioneer whose 1954 model of target acquisition still governs every button size and cursor path.
Appears in Fitts’s Law
Stanford behavior scientist behind the B = M · A · P model and the Tiny Habits method.
Appears in Fogg Behavior Model
Psychologist who, with Daniel Kahneman, showed that memories of an experience are built from its peak and its end — not its average.
Appears in Peak-End Rule
G
Pediatrician and systems thinker whose Systemantics argued that working complex systems always evolve from working simple ones.
Appears in Gall’s Law
Writer who popularized — and flattened — Ericsson’s research into the 10,000-hours rule.
Appears in Power Law of Practice
Bank of England economist whose warning about targets corrupting measures became a law of metrics everywhere.
Appears in Goodhart’s Law
Inventor of the movable-type printing press, whose name the reading-gravity diagram borrowed five centuries later.
Appears in Gutenberg Principle
H
British psychologist who showed in 1952 that decision time grows logarithmically with the number of choices.
Appears in Hick’s Law
Cognitive scientist and Pulitzer-winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach — and of the recursive law about everything taking longer.
Appears in Hofstadter’s Law
American psychologist who independently confirmed the choice-time relationship, giving the Hick-Hyman Law its second name.
Appears in Hick’s Law
I
Columbia professor whose 2000 jam study — 24 jams draw a crowd, 6 jams make the sale — anchored choice-overload research.
Appears in Paradox of Choice
J
Quality-management pioneer who generalized Pareto’s observation into “the vital few and the trivial many.”
Appears in Pareto Principle
K
Nobel-winning psychologist who, with Amos Tversky, named the planning fallacy — Hofstadter’s Law with data behind it.
Appears in Hofstadter’s Law
Hitachi researcher who co-ran the 1995 ATM study showing that interfaces judged more beautiful were also judged easier to use.
Appears in Aesthetic-Usability Effect
Co-founder of Gestalt psychology who carried the school to America and wrote its defining textbook.
Appears in Gestalt Principles
Gestalt psychology’s third founder, known for insight-learning experiments and for defending the school against the Nazis.
Appears in Gestalt Principles
Usability researcher who led the 1995 ATM experiments behind the aesthetic-usability effect: perceived beauty lifts perceived ease of use.
Appears in Aesthetic-Usability Effect
M
Cognitive-science founder whose Magical Number Seven paper defined the limits of working memory — and the power of chunking.
Appears in Miller’s Law
Consumer psychologist at Tulane whose work on self-assembly and choice showed that building something — even a cardboard box — makes people value it more.
Appears in IKEA Effect
Danish usability researcher who co-developed the original heuristic evaluation method with Jakob Nielsen in 1990.
Appears in Nielsen’s 10 Heuristics
Robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology whose 1970 essay drew the uncanny valley: affinity for humanlike figures rises with realism, then collapses just short of convincing.
Appears in Uncanny Valley
Human-factors psychologist whose cockpit studies with Linda Skitka named automation bias — trained pilots following faulty automated cues into errors they would never make unaided.
Appears in Automation Bias
N
Psychologist who co-authored the contour-bias studies, tying the preference for curves to the amygdala’s fast threat response.
Appears in Contour Bias
Turing Award winner and AI pioneer who, with Paul Rosenbloom, formalized the power law of practice in 1981.
Appears in Power Law of Practice
Usability’s most cited voice: the ten heuristics, the F-pattern studies, Jakob’s Law, and co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group.
Appears in Nielsen’s 10 Heuristics · Jakob’s Law · Eye Scanning Patterns
Author of The Design of Everyday Things, first Apple UX architect, and the person who put affordances, signifiers, and feedback in every designer’s vocabulary.
Appears in Norman’s Principles · Nielsen’s 10 Heuristics · Eye Scanning Patterns
Harvard Business School professor who led the 2011 experiments naming the IKEA effect: labor, successfully completed, leads to love.
Appears in IKEA Effect
P
Italian economist who noticed 80 percent of the land belonged to 20 percent of the owners — a shape that turned out to be everywhere.
Appears in Pareto Principle
Internet founding father who edited the RFCs, ran IANA, and wrote the robustness principle into TCP.
Appears in Postel’s Law
R
German psychiatrist whose 1933 experiments showed the distinct item in a group is the one remembered — the isolation effect.
Appears in Von Restorff Effect
Braun’s legendary industrial designer, whose ten principles of good design still set the bar — as little design as possible.
Appears in Rams’ 10 Principles
Author of The Lean Startup — Gall’s Law rewritten as a business methodology.
Appears in Gall’s Law
Cognitive scientist who co-authored the 1981 formalization of the power law of practice with Allen Newell.
Appears in Power Law of Practice
S
Educational psychologist who developed cognitive load theory in 1988 — intrinsic, extraneous, and germane load.
Appears in Cognitive Load Theory
Founding figure of human-computer interaction, author of Designing the User Interface and the Eight Golden Rules.
Appears in Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules
Psychologist who, with Kathleen Mosier, defined the two failures of automation bias: errors of commission and errors of omission.
Appears in Automation Bias
Psychologist whose The Paradox of Choice argued that more options make us less happy and less likely to act.
Appears in Paradox of Choice
Software essayist and Stack Overflow co-founder, chronicler of how a few bugs cause most of the pain.
Appears in Pareto Principle
Anthropologist who gave Goodhart’s Law its most quoted phrasing: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Appears in Goodhart’s Law
T
Xerox PARC and Apple engineer who invented copy-and-paste and the law of conservation of complexity.
Appears in Tesler’s Law
IBM researcher who co-authored the 1982 response-time studies establishing the 400-millisecond threshold for fluid human-computer interaction.
Appears in Doherty Threshold
Authors of Nudge, who turned defaults and framing into the discipline of choice architecture.
Appears in Paradox of Choice
Apple’s employee 66 and author of its first human interface guidelines, later of the First Principles of Interaction Design.
Appears in Tognazzini’s First Principles
Statistician and author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information — the standard for honest, ink-efficient charts.
Appears in Data Visualization
Kahneman’s research partner in the heuristics-and-biases program that documented the planning fallacy.
Appears in Hofstadter’s Law
W
Physiologist whose weight-discrimination experiments showed perception responds to ratios, not absolute amounts.
Appears in Weber-Fechner Law
Economist who, with Camerer and Loewenstein, named the curse of knowledge in 1989: once you know something, you cannot imagine not knowing it.
Appears in Curse of Knowledge
Founder of Gestalt psychology, whose 1912 motion-perception studies launched the idea that the mind perceives wholes first.
Appears in Gestalt Principles
Y
Comparative psychologist who co-discovered the inverted-U relationship between arousal and performance.
Appears in Yerkes-Dodson Law
L
Behavioral economist and co-author of the 1989 paper that named the curse of knowledge.
Appears in Curse of Knowledge
Z
HCI researcher who co-derived the steering law in 1997 and later shaped gesture typing at Google.
Appears in Steering Law
Lithuanian-Soviet psychologist whose 1927 experiments showed interrupted tasks are remembered about twice as well as finished ones.
Appears in Zeigarnik Effect