Few people wander around for long looking for the shopping cart, even on an online store they are visiting for the first time. There is usually a cart icon at the top right of the screen, and clicking the logo at the top left takes you back to the home page. Even though no one ever taught us, we already know where these things are.
In design, this tendency of users to expect the ways they have learned elsewhere to work the same on a new screen is called ‘Jakob's Law of Internet User Experience.’ Named after the usability researcher Jakob Nielsen, the principle points out that familiarity itself makes things easy to use.
In this article, we will look in turn at how Jakob's law came about, why people expect familiar ways of doing things, and how this principle can be used in design and how far it should be followed.
Understanding Jakob's Law
A Single Sentence Left by Nielsen
Jakob Nielsen is a Danish-born usability expert who founded the Nielsen Norman Group together with Donald Norman. He is famous for popularizing usability evaluation methods that quickly find problems in interfaces at low cost.
Around 2000, in an article on website design, Nielsen put forward the following idea: users spend most of their time on sites other than ours. From this follows the conclusion that users want our site to work the same way as the other sites they already know.
In the same article, Nielsen named this observation after himself, giving it the subheading Jakob's law. It sums up in a single sentence the point that the experience users have built up is more powerful than a designer's desire to show off something new.
This idea is not limited to websites. It is the same reason a car's brake pedal is always in the same place and a phone's number layout does not differ much from device to device. People naturally expect ways they have learned by habit to carry over to other things, and they feel at ease when those expectations are not broken.
Why We Expect the Familiar
There are clear reasons why people look for familiar ways of doing things. Psychology and design explain them with the following concepts.
- Mental model: Based on experience, people form a picture in their minds of how an object or screen will work, and they understand new screens by fitting them to that picture.
- Cognitive load: Learning an unfamiliar way requires more mental effort, leaving that much less energy for the task they actually wanted to do.
- Convention: As many sites repeatedly use the same positions and shapes, these harden into something like a shared agreement.
Among the usability principles Nielsen set out is ‘consistency and standards’: users should not have to wonder whether different words or shapes mean the same thing, and designs should follow the ways widely used in the industry. Jakob's law can be seen as a restatement of this principle from the user's point of view.
In the end, the reason users find a new screen easy is often not just that it is simple, but that it resembles ways they already know. Rather than reading a manual, users lean on past experience and tap first, and if the result matches their expectations, they remember the service as easy. Conversely, if their expectations keep missing, they find it hard no matter how clean the screen is.
What Happens When Familiarity Is Broken
Suddenly changing a familiar way of doing things easily frustrates users. A well-known example is when the photo-sharing app Snapchat greatly changed its layout in 2018, and more than a million people signed an online petition asking for the old design to be brought back.
(1) Feeling lost
When buttons disappear from where they always were, users take longer to do the same tasks and may even feel they have become clumsy.
(2) Users who leave
If people cannot quickly see what they are looking for, they do not wait long before moving to another, familiar service.
(3) Shaken trust
An awkward screen even lowers the sense of whether a service can be trusted. Users hesitate all the more when screens for paying money or entering personal information feel unfamiliar.
This does not mean that new designs are bad. It shows, however, that if you knock down habits users have long relied on all at once, they will not welcome even the most attractive screen.
Uses and Limits in Design
The easiest way to follow Jakob's law is to respect positions and shapes that are already widely used. There is no reason to change the shared understanding that a magnifying glass means search, three horizontal lines mean a menu, and underlined blue text is something you can click. When a change is truly necessary, it is a good idea to let the old way be used alongside the new one for a while, or to explain what has changed step by step so users can adapt gradually.
That does not mean every screen should be made the same. Keep familiarity in the basic framework, and express the service's own character through color, writing, and content. And if a convention causes inconvenience, you may introduce a better way, but then you should change it carefully while testing with real users.
In actual design work, designers often look at several similar services beforehand to understand the flows users are already familiar with. If they then add novelty only where it is really needed, even first-time visitors can feel the service's strengths right away without getting lost.
Jakob's law reminds us that users bring the experience they have gained elsewhere straight to our screens. Knowing this principle lets you design not by chasing novelty alone, but by building a better experience on the paths users already know.
Respecting the paths users already know: that is the first step toward easy-to-use design.
