Essay · 5 min read

Jakob's Law

Jon Yablonski (principle by Jakob Nielsen) · Laws of UX Free Beginner

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.

• 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.