Ref Sp UX Design

UX Design

Purpose

Make design decisions defensible. Separate what perceptual research actually establishes from what is standard, what is merely a house convention, and what is folklore repeated until it sounded true.

Trends rot; mechanisms do not. Everything in this skill is organised around why something works, so it survives the next redesign cycle.

When to use this skill

• Designing or reviewing a UI, page, screen, or component.
• "This feels off / cluttered / unbalanced / cheap" — and nobody can say why.
• Choosing spacing, margins, padding, or a layout grid.
• Picking type sizes, line height, or line length; deciding where bold, italic, or caps belong.
• Building or repairing a colour palette.
• Turning a wall of text into something people will actually read.
• Mobile-first layout and breakpoint decisions.
• Someone cites a "law of UX", a trend, or a design-system rule as if it settled the argument.

Route elsewhere when: the question is whether something passes — contrast ratio, target size, reflow, focus visibility, any WCAG threshold. That is .agents/skills/ref-sp-ux-accessibility/SKILL.md, which owns every normative number. This skill tells you how to build a palette; that one tells you whether the pair is legal.

The ownership rule, stated so it can be checked: this skill names WCAG success criteria by number (SC 1.4.1, SC 2.5.8) and never states their threshold values. One deliberate exception is recorded in ./references/typography.md — the 80-character cap, because that number is the object of a correction rather than a lookup. If you find yourself writing a ratio, a pixel count, or a percentage from WCAG anywhere else in this skill, it belongs in the accessibility skill instead.

The rule that makes this skill different: label the claim

Before asserting anything about design, know which of these you are saying. State the tier when it matters, and never let a lower tier impersonate a higher one.

Vendor design systems are interested parties. Material 3 and Apple's HIG are authoritative about their own platforms and are not evidence about human perception. A Material spacing token is tier 4 no matter how confident the documentation sounds.

Load ./references/folklore.md when someone quotes a rule you suspect is tier 5.

Foundations: grouping is the whole game

Almost every "this looks messy" complaint is a grouping failure, and grouping is the best-established part of the whole field.

Wertheimer's grouping principles — proximity, similarity, common fate, good continuation, closure, symmetry, parallelism — plus later additions, notably common region (Palmer, 1992) and element and uniform connectedness (Palmer & Rock, 1994). The authoritative modern review is Wagemans et al. (2012), Psychological Bulletin 138(6).

The review is careful, and so should you be: these are principles, not laws. They describe reliably how grouping is perceived. They do not adjudicate a spacing argument, and the review itself records the historical criticism that they were stated "with little precision".

The load-bearing consequence: proximity is the strongest and cheapest grouping signal available. That is why spacing is the most underrated detail in interface design — space is not decoration, it is the primary mechanism by which a viewer decides what belongs with what. Before adding a border, a card, a background, or a divider, ask whether space alone would do the job. It usually does, and it does it with less visual noise.

Apple's HIG states the same thing from the vendor side: "Group related items… you might use negative space, background shapes, colors, materials, or separator lines" — negative space listed first.

Load ./references/foundations.md for the full principle set, cognitive load, visual hierarchy mechanics, Nielsen's heuristics, and the honest scope limits of Fitts, Hick, and Miller.

Spacing

The single highest-leverage thing in a layout, and the least discussed.

• Space communicates relationship. Elements closer together are read as belonging together — this outranks similarity of colour or size. The most common real defect is uniform spacing: when everything is 16 px apart, nothing is grouped, and the eye gets no structure.
• Make the gaps unequal on purpose. A label 4 px from its input and 24 px from the next field says something. Both at 16 px says nothing.
• Space around a control is part of the control. Crowded controls are hard to tell apart — Apple's HIG says exactly this, and WCAG SC 2.5.8's spacing exception encodes it.
• A spacing scale is a convention, not a finding. 4/8-pt grids, 1.5 modular ratios, 8-point systems — all tier 4. They are worth adopting because consistency is legible, not because 8 is a perceptually special number. Say "we use an 8-pt scale" and never "8 px is correct".

Load ./references/spacing-and-layout.md for building a scale, density decisions, alignment, and optical vs mathematical centring.

Typography

Three things carry most of the weight: size, measure, and emphasis.

Size. There is a critical print size — below it reading speed collapses, above it speed is flat over a wide range (Legge & Bigelow, 2011). So body text has a floor, and past the floor, larger buys comfort, not speed. Apple's platform defaults (17 pt body, 11 pt minimum on iOS) and the web's 16 px convention sit consistently above that floor. Floor: tier 1. The specific numbers: tier 4.

Measure (line length). The most misreported fact in design writing. Dyson's work finds reading is fastest at long lines — around 100 characters — while readers prefer 45–72. The famous "50–75 characters is optimal" is a preference result being sold as a speed result. The honest statement: measure is a comfort optimum. The one place a normative cap exists is WCAG SC 1.4.8, and that is AAA — see ./references/typography.md.

Emphasis. Dyson & Beier (2016) tested this directly: bold words are perceptually salient but alternating into bold can impair letter identification, while switching to italic does not disrupt recognition. The synthesis worth remembering: the property that makes bold work as emphasis is the same property that makes it slightly harder to read.

• Bold — for emphasis and for headings. Correct tool, use it sparingly. A paragraph where six phrases are bold has no emphasis at all.
• Italic — genuinely more subtle. Right for titles, terms, asides, and voice. Weak for "look here". Whole paragraphs in italic read slower (Tinker, 1963/65).
• ALL CAPS — more re-fixations than lowercase (Perea, Rosa & Marcet, 2017). Fine for a label, bad for a sentence.
• Underline on the web means link. Do not use it for emphasis.

Load ./references/typography.md for scales, line height, tracking, font pairing, and web font loading.

Colour

• Build ramps in a perceptually uniform space. In HSL, equal lightness values do not look equally light across hues — that is why HSL palettes drift and why a "50% blue" and a "50% yellow" are nothing alike. oklch() and oklab() (CSS Color 4, Candidate Recommendation) exist to fix this. Use OKLCH to generate tonal ramps and you get predictable steps for free.
• Semantic roles, not a paint list. Define surface / on-surface / primary / on-primary / border / danger and their states. A palette that names colours by hue ("blue-500") stops scaling the moment you add a dark theme.
• Never encode meaning in hue alone. Red–green deficiency affects roughly 8% of males in Northern European populations (nearer 4.5% pooled globally). Pair hue with text, icon, shape, or position. The normative form of this rule is WCAG 1.4.1, Level A — see the accessibility skill.
• Contrast thresholds live in .agents/skills/ref-sp-ux-accessibility/SKILL.md. Do not restate them here. And if someone proposes APCA: it is a candidate method, not a standard, and it was removed from the WCAG 3 draft in 2023.
• 60-30-10 is folklore. Fine as a starting sketch, not a rule, and there is no perceptual research behind it.

Load ./references/color.md for ramp construction, dark theme, elevation, and gamut handling.

Readable long-form: the "no wall of text" problem

The evidence here is unusually direct. Nielsen's 1997 rewrite study measured four versions of the same content:

Note which one wins: cutting words. The instinct is to add bullets and subheads; the bigger effect was deleting text. (Sample size is not stated in the source — treat the ordering as durable and the percentages as indicative. 1997 lab study.)

On scanning, NN/g's eyetracking gives you a target and an anti-target:

• F-shaped pattern — the failure symptom, not a layout goal. It appears when text is unformatted and the reader is uncommitted, and NN/g is explicit that it "is bad for users and businesses". Anyone telling you to "design for the F-pattern" has inverted the finding.
• Layer-cake pattern — eyes moving between headings and subheadings. This is what you design for. It is what good heading structure produces.

Practical consequences: front-load the point; headings that state content rather than tease it; one idea per paragraph; lists for things that are actually lists; measure inside the comfort band.

Load ./references/content-readability.md for structure patterns, plain-language guidance, and why readability formulas mislead.

Mobile-first and responsive

• Mobile-first is a content-priority discipline, not a media-query order. Starting narrow forces the ranking question — what actually matters — and prevents designing a desktop layout you then amputate.
• Break where the content breaks. Content-driven breakpoints beat device-width breakpoints, because device widths keep changing and your content does not.
• Size classes are a sanity check, not a mandate. Material 3's compact <600 / medium 600–839 / expanded 840–1199 / large 1200–1599 / extra-large 1600+ dp are useful for asking "what am I actually on", and they are tier 4.
• The thumb-zone heat map is over-claimed. Its usual source is Hoober's 2013 observation of 1,333 people, which found one-handed use at 49% — common, but not the majority, and cradled (36%) and two-handed (15%) use place fingers elsewhere. The data is from 2013 phones. Put primary actions within easy reach because it is cheap, not because "the thumb zone" is a law.
• Height rarely matters. Material's own note: most layouts scroll vertically, so adapting to available height is rarely needed.

Load ./references/responsive.md for breakpoint strategy, touch vs pointer input, and density.

Before you call a design decision done

1. Can you say why in one sentence that is not "it looks better"?
2. Which tier is your justification — research, standard, convention, or taste? Taste is allowed; claiming it is research is not.
3. Does grouping survive: would a stranger draw the same boxes around your content that you would?
4. Does it survive the narrow-viewport and text-zoom checks (WCAG SC 1.4.10 and 1.4.4)? Values and procedure: .agents/skills/ref-sp-ux-accessibility/references/testing.md.
5. Is any information carried by colour alone?
6. Have you deleted anything? Conciseness measured better than every formatting change.

Sources and staleness

./references/sources.md maps every dated or numeric claim above to its primary, when it was verified, and what would invalidate it — including which claims are currently corroborated but not primary-verified. Content verified 2026-08-02.

Perceptual mechanisms age slowly; vendor conventions and CSS specification status age quickly. If a number here is load-bearing for a deliverable, re-check it.