Jakob's Law: why familiar beats clever

Jakob's Law says people spend most of their time on products that aren't yours, so they expect yours to work the same way. Meeting that expectation isn't a failure of imagination — it's how you spend a person's limited attention on the few things that actually set you apart.

What is Jakob's Law?

Named after usability researcher Jakob Nielsen, the law observes that users build a mental model from every other product they touch. A cart sits top-right. A logo returns you home. Underlined text is a link. Honour those patterns and the interface disappears, so the person can get on with the task instead of decoding your screen.

Why does familiarity make a product feel easier?

Every unfamiliar pattern is a small tax: the user has to stop, notice, and work out what you meant. Collect enough of those and even a beautiful product feels tiring. Convention is borrowed cognition — it lets you reuse understanding the person already has, for free.

• Put common controls where people already look for them.
• Use words users recognise over clever coinages of your own.
• Make interactive things look interactive, and static things static.
• Break a familiar pattern only when the payoff clearly beats the cost of relearning it.

So when should you be original?

Familiar isn't the same as forgettable. Spend your inventiveness on the one moment that is genuinely yours — the core idea, the signature interaction, the thing people will describe to a friend — and keep the scaffolding around it quietly conventional. That contrast is exactly what makes the original part land.

How we use it

We start from the conventions your users already carry, then choose — deliberately, not by accident — the handful of places worth breaking them. Convention where it costs nothing, invention where it pays: that's how a product feels both obvious and unmistakably yours.