Building the Product

Should I just copy the UI patterns of apps my users already use, or does that make my product forgettable?

A starting point

Copy the patterns, not the personality. Familiar navigation, familiar checkout, familiar sign-in means users spend zero effort learning your mechanics and all their attention on your actual value. As a starting point, save your originality for the thing that's genuinely new about your product, and let everything else feel boringly familiar.

Go deeper

Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time.

3 resources 3 link-checked Read Use

Read

✍️ Essay
✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Why we picked it This is the one principle that answers your worry head on: users spend most of their time on other apps, so they expect yours to work the way those do. It names why familiarity is a feature, not laziness, and where the mental models your users already carry come from. Treat it as the case for copying on purpose, then read the counterpoint below for where copying stops paying off.

Jakob's Law

From Laws of UX by Jon Yablonski (principle by Jakob Nielsen) 5 min read

  • Users build expectations from every other app they use, then bring those expectations to yours, so matching known patterns lowers the effort to learn your product.
  • Copying a convention is not unoriginal, it frees the user to focus on the task instead of decoding your interface.
  • The familiarity that helps is external consistency (matching the wider category), not just internal consistency inside your own app.
Open lawsofux.com →
📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

Why we picked it This is the honest counterweight to just copying everything: it lays out exactly when breaking a convention earns its keep and when it only costs you. The author draws the line with concrete cases (Arc's sidebar, Perplexity's answer-first search) so you can tell a purposeful difference from a random one. Read it as the boundary on copying, so your product stays learnable where it should and distinct where it matters.

Familiar vs Novel

From Laws of UX by Jon Yablonski 8 min read

  • Copy the plumbing (navigation, forms, checkout) where users just want to get through, and save novelty for the one or two moments that are your actual edge.
  • Novelty only pays when it makes an action faster, clearer, or more memorable, not when it is different for its own sake.
  • Any deviation from a convention needs real user testing behind it, because a surprising pattern quietly costs trust when it has no payoff.
Open lawsofux.com →

Use

🛠️ Tool
✓ Link checked Freemium Beginner

Why we picked it Before you invent an onboarding, a paywall, or a settings screen, look at how a few hundred real products already solved it. Mobbin is a searchable library of actual app screens and full flows, so you copy patterns that have been shipped and tested rather than guessing. It is the fastest way to act on Jakob's Law without reinventing the obvious parts.

Mobbin

From Mobbin by Mobbin Ongoing reference

  • Browse real, current screens and end to end flows (onboarding, checkout, paywalls) from over a thousand shipped apps, not mockups.
  • Search by screen, UI element, or flow so you can study exactly the pattern you are about to build.
  • Free tier covers a lot, with a paid Pro plan for full search and Figma copy, so you can start without paying.
Open mobbin.com →

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