Make Buttons a Sensible Size And Group Them Together by Function

The US psychologist Paul Fitts wrote a paper in 1954 called The information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movement (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/13174710), which was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. Fitts’ work would go on to be one of the most well-studied models of human motion.

To dumb Fitts’ law down for us UX people, rather than psychologists, the core concept that applies to us is:

The time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the ratio between the distance to the target and the size of the target.

If you’re building a user interface, it’s really simple to do this: make buttons big enough, and placed in such a way that users can efficiently find them and move between them—ideally grouped by function:

Figure 14.1: Which is easier to use and less prone to a misclick...