jakobs-law

Jakob's Law, articulated by Jakob Nielsen, states that users prefer your site to work the same way as other sites they already know. Users arrive with pre-built expectations about navigation placement, icon meanings, and interaction behaviors formed by time spent on other products.

Departure is justified when the conventional approach fails your use case, your users hold a stronger domain-specific convention, testing shows measurably better performance, or no strong convention exists yet. It is not justified by aesthetic preference or wanting to feel differentiated.

The strongest conventions include logo top-left linking home, shopping cart icons for checkout, hamburger menus for hidden navigation, magnifying glass for search, X to close modals, and blue underlined text for links. Violating these forces users to relearn basic interactions.

Review how 3-5 comparable products handle the interaction you are designing, then catalog the dominant patterns. Weight your decisions by task frequency: high-frequency interactions should follow conventions, while low-frequency ones allow more latitude.

No. Teaching users a custom pattern through onboarding is expensive and fragile compared to leveraging existing expectations. The learning cost of a novel pattern is paid on every visit until mastered, so convention should be the default and innovation the reasoned exception.