Website Design – A Practical Approach To Use Fitts’ Law

Fitts’ law says “the closer and larger a target, the faster it is to click on that target”. This is well known school of thought in website design. Let’s explore it further.

Larger Targets in Website Design:

The larger a target, the faster it is to acquire. In website designing we always strive for a click of the visitor either to go in deep pages or hit our sweet button-Buy, Download or Inquire. Therefore, to follow Fitts’ law is working dramatically in our benefits by creating larger buttons which we intend to make prominent in a UI design or UX design. It also helps you to get the most pixels out of your interface. It is wise to cover entire area of the button or link to make it clickable.

At another facet of coin it breaks the balance in your interface and likely absorbs screen real estate. However, the predicted usability of the size of a button progress in a non-linear fashion that means you can enlarge button at some extent but more enlargement will prove useless in terms of usability.

Cursor Movement in Website Design:

“The closer the target, the faster it is to acquire”. There are some buttons and links that users need on regular-bases so if we put them next to each other we can minimize the amount of pixels the cursor have to travel and speed up interaction.

In case of grouping and separating different classes of functionality or content this law is not working because it makes difficult create a clear and consistent structure and increase its discoverability. In order to providing a clean and tidy interface many website design shows the arrangement of drop-down menus so it uncluttered the interface and organize the content. In contrast to Fitts’ law drop-downs requires longer cursor movement since user has to first click or hover over the drop-down and travel to access the desired target or further go to sub-menu, but this is more practical approach than Fitts’ law suggests. Another thing is going to against the Fitts’ law is that if you put buttons as possible as nears to others may lead visitor to click on undesired button area. It is good it action is reversible, but if it is not then may lead to bad consequences.

Minimize Physical Efforts in Website Design:

This law says minimize the muscular tension of the user so your website design should prefer effortless movements. The direct benefits of such arrangement is that it keeps visitor for prolong periods means more retention on your site so more chances of conversion.

This law is not applicable in case of the weighty commands like powering off or rebutting the machine or device since they cannot be undone if mistakenly pushed therefore, they are made into slider or put at an empty corner.

Prime Pixels in Website Design:

In order to exploit prime pixels which is fastest to acquire pixel in any situation is the pixel at the cursor point thus, right-click context menu comes into existence. There are two kind of context menu-rounded and linear. Since rounded menu is advisable according to Fitts’ law but it is not practical approach so everywhere you will find linear right-click context menu.