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
Psychologist at NYU Stern whose research with Daniel Oppenheimer showed how processing fluency shapes judgments, from stock prices to reasoning.
Appears in Processing Fluency
Computer scientist at Microsoft Research whose work on human-AI interaction produced the 2019 guidelines, distilled from two decades of scattered recommendations and tested against products people use daily.
Appears in Microsoft’s 18 AI Guidelines
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 · Anchoring 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
British psychologist whose 1983 paper Ironies of Automation showed that automating the easy parts of a job leaves an out-of-practice operator the hard ones.
Appears in Out-of-the-Loop Problem
UCLA information scientist who described berrypicking, the evolving, bit-by-bit way people actually search.
Appears in Cognitive Models of Information Retrieval
Social psychologist known for research on self-control and ego depletion, the theory behind decision fatigue.
Appears in Decision Fatigue
Information scientist who proposed the anomalous state of knowledge: people search because they sense a gap they can’t fully describe.
Appears in Cognitive Models of Information Retrieval
Information retrieval and machine learning researcher, for many years at Microsoft Research, working on ranking, personalization, and how people read what a system surfaces.
Appears in Microsoft’s 18 AI Guidelines
Usability researcher who, with David Lane at Rice University, ran the 1998 tests that named banner blindness.
Appears in Banner Blindness
Inventor of the web and founder of the W3C, whose line “the power of the web is in its universality” opens the accessibility case.
Appears in WCAG and POUR
Civil rights advocate and founder of PolicyLink whose 2017 essay The Curb-Cut Effect argued that changes designed for excluded groups end up benefiting everyone.
Appears in Curb Cut Effect
Software engineer who led the design of the Java Collections Framework, and whose 2006 talk How to Design a Good API and Why It Matters applies least astonishment to naming and behavior.
Appears in Principle of Least Astonishment
UX designer who coined the term dark patterns in 2010, built the pattern library now at deceptive.design, and wrote the book Deceptive Patterns (2023).
Appears in Dark Patterns
Canadian poet and typographer whose The Elements of Typographic Style (1992) set out the widely quoted guideline of 45 to 75 characters per line.
Appears in Line Length
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
Xerox PARC researcher who helped found human-computer interaction as a science and, with Peter Pirolli, developed information foraging theory.
Appears in Cognitive Models of Information Retrieval
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
Psychologist whose book Influence (1984) named social proof as one of six principles of persuasion, and whose field studies showed how descriptive norms change behavior.
Appears in Social Proof
User researcher at Microsoft, among the practitioners who tested the candidate guidelines against products people use every day.
Appears in Microsoft’s 18 AI Guidelines
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 when challenge and skill are matched.
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
Stanford psychologist known for research on mindsets, including evidence that beliefs about willpower shape whether people feel depleted.
Appears in Decision Fatigue
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 · Ebbinghaus Illusion
Economist and military analyst whose 1961 paper on risk and ambiguity showed that people avoid unknown probabilities; later known for releasing the Pentagon Papers.
Appears in Ambiguity Effect
American engineer whose work on situation awareness, and the 1995 study with Esin Kiris, named the cost of supervising automation rather than doing the work.
Appears in Out-of-the-Loop Problem
Expertise researcher whose deliberate-practice work explains why not all repetitions bend the learning curve equally.
Appears in Power Law of Practice
Greek mathematician whose Elements, around 300 BC, defined the extreme and mean ratio — the golden ratio — two thousand years before it got its name.
Appears in Golden Ratio
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
Principal researcher at Microsoft Research working on AI agents and the interfaces people use to direct them.
Appears in Microsoft’s 18 AI Guidelines
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
Neuroscientist who, with David Milner, proposed separate visual pathways for perception and action; his grasping studies made the Ebbinghaus illusion a test case for the idea.
Appears in Ebbinghaus Illusion
Bank of England economist whose warning about targets corrupting measures became a law of metrics everywhere.
Appears in Goodhart’s Law
Dutch book designer whose 1946 diagonal construction places a text block on any page shape without measuring.
Appears in Canons of Page Construction
British psychologist, author of Eye and Brain, who explained illusions such as the Müller-Lyer figure as perception’s depth and size cues being misapplied.
Appears in Müller-Lyer Illusion
Inventor of the movable-type printing press, whose name the reading-gravity diagram borrowed five centuries later.
Appears in Gutenberg Principle
H
Design and research leader at Motorola, Microsoft, and Amazon, known for methods that surface articulated and latent customer needs; co-created UI Tenets and Traps.
Appears in UI Tenets and Traps
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
Graphic designer and longtime graphics director at Time whose illustrated explanation graphics Edward Tufte criticized as chartjunk, sparking a lasting debate.
Appears in Chartjunk
Microsoft's chief scientific officer, whose 1999 principles of mixed-initiative interaction are among the earliest sources this set was distilled from.
Appears in Microsoft’s 18 AI Guidelines
American psychologist who independently confirmed the choice-time relationship, giving the Hick-Hyman Law its second name.
Appears in Hick’s Law
I
Researcher on attention, interruption, and productivity, whose work on when a system should break in underpins the guidance about timing.
Appears in Microsoft’s 18 AI Guidelines
Microsoft Research scientist studying human-AI collaboration, and how people decide when a machine's judgment deserves their trust.
Appears in Microsoft’s 18 AI Guidelines
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 · Decision Fatigue
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 · Anchoring Effect
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
Responsible AI strategist and designer at Microsoft, working on how principles for AI become decisions a product team can make.
Appears in Microsoft’s 18 AI Guidelines
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
Information scientist whose information search process model traced the thoughts and feelings people go through while searching.
Appears in Cognitive Models of Information Retrieval
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
Psychologist and statistician at Rice University who coauthored the 1998 study that named banner blindness and created the Online Statistics Education project.
Appears in Banner Blindness
Information scientist who defined exploratory search, contrasting quick lookup with searching to learn and investigate.
Appears in Cognitive Models of Information Retrieval
User research leader who co-developed the Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation (RITE) method, and co-created UI Tenets and Traps with Steve Herbst at Microsoft.
Appears in UI Tenets and Traps
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
German psychologist and sociologist who in 1889 published the illusion in which arrow-like ends make equal lines look unequal.
Appears in Müller-Lyer Illusion
Cambridge computer scientist and security pioneer whose 1972 work discussed assigning privileges dynamically, an early form of least privilege.
Appears in Principle of Least Privilege
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 · Banner Blindness
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 · Banner Blindness
Harvard Business School professor who led the 2012 experiments naming the IKEA effect: labor, successfully completed, leads to love.
Appears in IKEA Effect
Researcher on the failure modes of AI systems, and on making those failures observable rather than surprising.
Appears in Microsoft’s 18 AI Guidelines · Explainability
P
Italian mathematician and friar whose De divina proportione (1509), illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci, made the ratio famous in art.
Appears in Golden Ratio
Psychologist whose dual-coding theory (1971) proposed that concrete ideas are stored as both images and words, the classic explanation for why pictures are remembered better.
Appears in Picture Superiority Effect
Italian economist who noticed 80 percent of the land belonged to 20 percent of the population — a shape that turned out to be everywhere.
Appears in Pareto Principle
Nielsen Norman Group researcher whose eye-tracking studies showed that people still dodge ads on mobile and desktop.
Appears in Banner Blindness
Cognitive scientist who, with Stuart Card, developed information foraging theory and the idea of information scent.
Appears in Cognitive Models of Information Retrieval
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
Programmer and author whose book The Art of Unix Programming (2003) sets out the Rule of Least Surprise: in interface design, always do the least surprising thing.
Appears in Principle of Least Astonishment
Psychologist who showed that easy-to-read statements are judged more true and proposed, with Norbert Schwarz and Piotr Winkielman, that fluency underlies aesthetic pleasure.
Appears in Processing Fluency
Psychologist and computer scientist at the University of British Columbia whose 1997 flicker experiments with Kevin O’Regan and James Clark showed that large changes to a scene go unseen across a brief blank.
Appears in Change Blindness
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
Computer scientist at Duke University who argues that high-stakes decisions should use interpretable machine learning models instead of explained black boxes.
Appears in Explainability
Computer scientist known as a father of information retrieval, whose work included the vector space model and relevance feedback.
Appears in Cognitive Models of Information Retrieval
MIT computer scientist who formulated the principle of least privilege and, with Michael Schroeder, the classic design principles for protecting information in computer systems.
Appears in Principle of Least Privilege
Educational psychologist who began cognitive load theory in 1988; the split into intrinsic, extraneous, and germane load came in the 1990s.
Appears in Cognitive Load Theory
Cognitive scientist whose 1967 recognition study showed that people remember pictures far better than words or sentences.
Appears in Picture Superiority Effect
Founding figure of human-computer interaction, author of Designing the User Interface and the Eight Golden Rules.
Appears in Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules
Physician and biomedical informatics pioneer who built MYCIN at Stanford in the 1970s, an early expert system that could explain the rules behind its diagnoses.
Appears in Explainability
Economist, political scientist, and cognitive psychologist who coined satisficing in 1956 and won the 1978 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for research on decision-making in organizations.
Appears in Satisficing
Psychologist at the University of Illinois who named and reviewed change blindness with Daniel Levin in 1997, and showed that people can miss even a swapped conversation partner.
Appears in Change Blindness
Psychologist who, with Kathleen Mosier, defined the two failures of automation bias: errors of commission and errors of omission.
Appears in Automation Bias
English painter and engraver who coined the rule of thirds in Remarks on Rural Scenery (1797), arguing for two-thirds land to one-third sky.
Appears in Rule of Thirds
Computer scientist who coauthored, with Jerome Saltzer, the 1975 paper that set out design principles for computer security, including least privilege.
Appears in Principle of Least Privilege
Psychologist whose The Paradox of Choice argued that more options make us less happy and less likely to act.
Appears in Paradox of Choice · Satisficing
Social psychologist whose research on metacognitive experience showed how the ease of processing information shapes judgments of truth, liking, and risk.
Appears in Processing Fluency
American engineer at MIT whose scale of ten automation levels, written with William Verplank in 1978, still frames how much a system decides on its own.
Appears in Human-in-the-Loop
Social psychologist whose 1935 experiments with an apparently moving light showed people in ambiguous situations converging on a group’s judgment, and keeping it when alone.
Appears in Social Proof
Software essayist and Stack Overflow co-founder, whose 80/20 essay warns that every user needs a different 20 percent of the features.
Appears in Pareto Principle
American psychologist whose 1935 doctoral experiment on color and word interference became one of the most replicated findings in psychology.
Appears in Stroop Effect
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
Researcher on human-centered AI, studying how the systems people work alongside affect their wellbeing.
Appears in Microsoft’s 18 AI Guidelines
T
Essayist and former trader whose book The Black Swan calls the evidence hidden by survivorship bias silent evidence.
Appears in Survivorship Bias · Lindy Effect
Microsoft's chief scientist, known for research on personalized search and for breaking large tasks into pieces a person can finish.
Appears in Microsoft’s 18 AI Guidelines · Cognitive Models of Information Retrieval
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 · Choice Architecture · Nudge Theory
Psychologist at the University of Minnesota who, with Donald Paterson, studied the legibility of print for decades, including a 1929 study of line length and reading speed.
Appears in Line Length
English-born psychologist at Cornell who brought German experimental psychology to American students; his 1901 textbook made the Ebbinghaus illusion widely known, hence its other name, Titchener circles.
Appears in Ebbinghaus Illusion
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
Psychologist whose feature integration theory (1980, with Garry Gelade) explained why unique features pop out while combinations of features demand attention.
Appears in Visual Search
German-born typographer who measured medieval manuscripts and reconstructed the golden canon of page construction in The Form of the Book.
Appears in Canons of Page Construction
Statistician and author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information — the standard for honest, ink-efficient charts.
Appears in Data Visualization · Chartjunk
Kahneman’s research partner in the heuristics-and-biases program that documented the planning fallacy.
Appears in Hofstadter’s Law · Anchoring Effect
V
Consumer psychologist whose studies with Roy Baumeister found that making many choices weakens later self-control.
Appears in Decision Fatigue
Leads UX research and education for responsible AI at Microsoft, and drove the HAX Toolkit that turned these guidelines into something a product team can actually apply.
Appears in Microsoft’s 18 AI Guidelines
W
Statistician whose 1943 memos for Columbia’s Statistical Research Group estimated aircraft vulnerability from the damage on planes that returned, the classic case of survivorship bias.
Appears in Survivorship Bias
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
Professor emeritus at the University of Washington's Allen School and the one author on the paper from outside Microsoft, working on explainable and controllable AI.
Appears in Microsoft’s 18 AI Guidelines · Explainability
Founder of Gestalt psychology, whose 1912 motion-perception studies launched the idea that the mind perceives wholes first.
Appears in Gestalt Principles
Y
Psychologist at Harvard Medical School whose guided search model explains how attention is steered during search, and who showed that rare targets are often missed.
Appears in Visual Search
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
American linguist at Harvard whose study of word frequencies produced the rank-frequency law that carries his name, and the principle of least effort he offered to explain it.
Appears in Zipf’s Law