The Laws of UX by Jon Yablonski is a great introduction into the world of design. In just 128 pages, Yablonski manages to pack this book full of examples and dives into 10 basic UX principles:
Jakob’s Law: Users spend most of their time on other websites, so they expect your site to work the same way as those they already know.
Fitts’s Law: The time it takes to reach a target is determined by the distance to the target and the size of the target.
Hick’s Law: The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number of available options.
Miller’s Law: The average person can keep 7(plus or minus 2) items in their working memory.
Postel’s Law: Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.
Peak-End Rule: People judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak and at its end, rather than on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.
Aesthetic-Usability Effect: Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable.
von Restorff Effect: When multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered.
Tesler’s Law: Tesler’s law, also known as the law of conservation and complexity, states that for any system there is a certain amount of complexity that cannot be reduced.
Doherty Threshold: Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace (<400 ms) that ensures that neither has to wait on the other.
The book contains 12 digestible chapters, the first 10 describing the above laws. Chapters 11 and 12 dig into practical ways to apply them.
NOTE: There is also a beautiful website which presents these principles in a simple and elegant way.
As a software engineer, I am frequently making first passes at UI/UX decisions. Reading through this book has really leveled up my design chops and has proved to be invaluable to me on a daily basis.