Fitts-Law

Fitts’ Law can be described as “The time required to move to a target is a function of the target size and distance to the target.”

Accessible is easier

We can apply this to web design by looking at the hit area of our objects. Meaning the larger we can make the clickable area of key links and navigational elements the easier they will be to click on. While some users may be extremely proficient at using the mouse and the web, there are a lot of users who still have trouble with these basic functions.

A common misuse of Fitts’ law is when a design is coded so that the text of a menu bar is clickable but the tabs themselves are not. Rather than just making the text clickable it would be a great idea to increase the clickable area.

This can work in the opposite way as well, meaning items we want to be difficult to be clicked on (such as cancel buttons / links) should have a smaller clickable area. This is why you often see forms or actions that have large “save” buttons but text based “delete” or “cancel” links. WordPress uses this law extremely well.

Fitts’s law is a predictive model of human movement developed by Paul Fitts, an American psychologist. When it is used in a design, it means that your buttons should be large, obvious and the distance between one action to the next should be minimised.