Key takeaways
Familiar patterns shorten the learning curve: users already know how to use them.
Depart from convention only when the gain is worth the cost of relearning.
Origins
The law is named after Jakob Nielsen, a usability pioneer who co-founded the Nielsen Norman Group with Don Norman, a former Apple vice president of research. Nielsen championed “discount usability engineering”, a way of improving interfaces quickly and cheaply, and developed methods such as heuristic evaluation. His observation was simple: every product a person uses teaches them expectations that they carry to the next one.
In practice
- Put navigation, search and the cart where people already look for them.
- Reuse established icons and labels instead of inventing new ones.
- When you do change a familiar pattern, roll it out gradually and explain what changed.
Further reading
- Jakob’s Law of Internet User Experience — Nielsen Norman Group
- Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design — Nielsen Norman Group
- Jakob’s Law on Laws of UX — Jon Yablonski
The illustration is our own, drawn after the idea of this law’s card in Laws of UX by Jon Yablonski.
