03 — Understanding Before Designing
Some encounters don’t necessarily teach us something new, but instead help us see what we thought we already knew from a different perspective.
On Tuesday, October 27, 2026, as part of my academic exchange at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan, I had the opportunity to participate in a workshop exploring the Laws of UX, led by their author, Jon Yablonski, during my User Interface Design class.
What made this experience particularly meaningful to me wasn’t that I was discovering his work for the first time, but precisely that I had already encountered it throughout my design education.
For several years, I’ve been interested in how we perceive, understand, and interact with digital interfaces. Principles related to proximity, familiarity, cognitive load, and decision-making are among the concepts we gradually learn to integrate into our design process.
But there’s often a significant difference between knowing a principle and fully understanding how it shapes an experience.
And that’s exactly what this half-day workshop allowed me to explore.
Through his project, Laws of UX, Jon Yablonski makes principles rooted in human psychology more accessible, helping designers better understand the behaviors and cognitive processes that influence how we interact with digital products.
To me, the essential idea behind this work is quite simple: people shouldn’t always have to adapt to technology. Technology should be designed with a better understanding of how people think and behave.
A perspective that strongly resonates with my own vision of design.
Today, we can imagine increasingly sophisticated interfaces, adding more interactions, features, and personalization options. Yet this creative freedom doesn’t necessarily make a product easier to understand, more accessible, or even more enjoyable to use.
One of the challenges of being a designer lies precisely in knowing how to make the right decisions.
Why preserve an established navigation convention rather than invent a new one? Why group certain pieces of information together? Why limit the number of choices presented to users? And above all, how can we distinguish a genuinely meaningful design decision from a purely aesthetic preference?
The Laws of UX provide valuable perspectives for approaching these questions more thoughtfully.
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Take Jakob’s Law, for example, which reminds us that users rely on their previous experiences to understand new interfaces. It highlights the importance of familiar conventions and the mental models people have already developed.
This doesn’t mean we should stop innovating. On the contrary, I believe meaningful innovation also involves knowing what we can transform without compromising the user’s understanding.
Similarly, Hick’s Law encourages us to consider the complexity of the choices we present, while Fitts’s Law reminds us that the size and distance of interactive elements influence how easily people can reach them.
And that’s what I find particularly interesting: understanding that certain interface decisions, sometimes perceived as minor details, can have a significant impact on someone’s experience.
Participating in this workshop with Jon Yablonski allowed me to revisit these concepts from a different perspective, moving beyond theoretical knowledge toward a more practical understanding.
It also reinforced something I consider essential: design principles should never become rules that we apply mechanically.
A psychological principle doesn’t replace user research, observation, or usability testing. Instead, it helps us form hypotheses, guide decisions, and better explain why a particular solution might be appropriate in a given context.
After all, every user has their own circumstances, experiences, abilities, and expectations. An interface doesn’t automatically become universally intuitive simply because it follows a set of established guidelines.
This is also why I consider psychology to be a fundamental part of my future profession.
As an aspiring UX/UI and interaction designer, I don’t just want to learn how to create functional or visually coherent interfaces. I want to understand what allows someone to feel comfortable with technology, trust it, and use it without constantly having to think about how it works.
This perspective becomes even more important in a world where our interactions are no longer limited to screens, but increasingly extend to connected devices, services, and entire ecosystems.
As technology becomes more complex, I believe our responsibility as designers is to make the experience more human.
This encounter at the College for Creative Studies gave me something I find particularly valuable in my education: the opportunity to question, deepen, and reinterpret knowledge I had already developed throughout my journey.
Above all, it reminded me that understanding a principle is never the end goal in design. What matters is learning to recognize when, why, and how to apply it, but also when to question it.
Because designing a better experience doesn’t begin with what technology allows us to do, but with understanding the people who will use it.
To be continued…
