Jakob's Law: Why Users Want Your Product to Work Like Everyone Else's

Every designer faces the same temptation: to make something original. Jakob’s Law, popularized by Jakob Nielsen and featured prominently in Jon Yablonski’s Laws of UX, is the discipline that tempers it. Users spend most of their time in other people’s products, and they bring those learned expectations to yours.

What does Jakob’s Law actually claim?

That familiarity beats novelty in the vast majority of interface decisions. A shopping cart icon in the top right, a logo that links home, a password field that masks input, a swipe that refreshes. None of these conventions are optimal in some theoretical sense. All of them are free, because users arrive already knowing them. Violating a convention charges your users a learning cost, and they pay it with patience you have not earned yet.

When should you break conventions?

The law is not a command to copy. It is an allocation rule. Save your novelty budget for the one or two things that genuinely differentiate your product, the interactions that are your product. Spotify did not reinvent buttons; it reinvented music discovery. Your navigation, forms, checkout, and error messages should be boring. Your core value can be daring.

A useful test: if a user must learn your pattern before they can experience your value, the pattern is costing you customers.

What do designers take away from it?

Jakob’s Law gives teams permission to stop reinventing. Stakeholders often push for originality in exactly the wrong places, menus and forms, because those are the parts they see in reviews. The law reframes convention-following not as laziness but as user empathy, backed by every usability study ever run on learnability.

Why does Tremoloo share this book?

Because a large share of the friction we find in audits is self-inflicted novelty: creative navigation, renamed standard patterns, gestures nobody discovers. Jakob’s Law is the fastest way we know to explain why boring converts. When clients internalize it, redesign conversations shift from “how do we look different” to “where should we be different,” which is a far better question.

Wondering where your product should be familiar and where it should dare? Our product design team can help you spend your novelty budget wisely.