Laws of UX
Jakob's Law
Users spend most of their time on other sites, so they expect yours to work the same way.
Where it comes from
It was articulated by Jakob Nielsen — the 'usability' half of the Nielsen Norman Group — around 2000, distilling a career of watching people use websites into a single, blunt observation about expectation.
Why it matters for your website
Your visitors arrive with expectations built from every other site they've used. Jakob's Law says people prefer your site to behave like the sites they already know. Departing from convention forces relearning, and relearning costs patience and trust.
The convention a visitor expects isn't arbitrary — it's the average of every other site they use. The logo links home and sits top-left. The cart is top-right. The search box has a magnifying glass. Each of these is a tiny agreement you didn't have to negotiate, and breaking it for novelty's sake spends the user's patience on relearning instead of on your product.
This doesn't mean every site should look the same. It means that where you differ, you should be differing on purpose — and ideally where it adds genuine value, not in the plumbing of navigation, forms, and controls. Originality in the load-bearing patterns is usually paid for in confusion.
Wrong vs right
A clickable logo that doesn't link home, a hamburger menu that opens a search box, and a cart icon that scrolls to a footer — each one quietly violates what the visitor expects.
Logo links home, menu opens navigation, cart shows the cart. Familiar plumbing leaves the visitor's attention free for your actual product.
A checkout that invents its own multi-step interaction nobody has seen before, forcing users to learn a new flow at the most sensitive moment.
A conventional checkout — recognisable fields, expected order, standard controls — so the user can complete it on autopilot.
Putting primary navigation in an unusual place (say, a vertical bar on the right) purely for visual distinction.
Conventional navigation placement, with distinctiveness expressed through brand, content, and craft instead.
Understanding Jakob's Law
Jakob's Law is an observation about transfer of learning. Every person who lands on your site has spent thousands of hours on other people's sites, and that experience hardens into expectations: where things are, what they're called, how they behave. Your interface is judged against that accumulated mental model, not against a blank slate. Meeting the expectation is nearly free; violating it forces the user to stop, notice, and relearn.
The practical force of the law is conservative, and deliberately so. Conventions — the home-linking logo, the top-right cart, the underlined link — exist because they've been tested by billions of interactions. Adopting them isn't a failure of imagination; it's letting users bring their hard-won knowledge with them. Novelty is best spent where it differentiates your product, not where it reinvents the controls.
There's nuance: conventions shift, and sometimes a genuinely better pattern is worth the cost of teaching it. But the bar for breaking a convention is high — the new pattern has to be enough of an improvement to outweigh the relearning it forces on every visitor. When in doubt, behave like the sites your users already know, and earn distinction elsewhere.
How Kweri checks it
This is largely a judgement call, and Kweri treats it as one. It can flag some recognisable convention breaks — for instance a logo that doesn't link home, or navigation in unexpected places — but whether a given departure from the norm helps or hurts depends on context and on what your specific audience already expects. So Kweri points out where your interface seems to diverge from established patterns and asks whether the divergence is earning its keep, rather than scoring it outright.
FAQ
What is Jakob's Law?
Jakob's Law states that users spend most of their time on sites other than yours, so they prefer your site to work the same way as the others they already know. Following established conventions reduces the effort of learning your interface.
Who came up with Jakob's Law?
It's named after Jakob Nielsen, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, who articulated it from decades of web usability research. It was later popularised for designers through Jon Yablonski's Laws of UX.
Does Jakob's Law mean I can't be original?
No. It means originality is best spent on your content, brand and product rather than on the conventional plumbing of navigation, forms and controls. Be distinctive where it adds value; be conventional where users rely on familiarity.
What are examples of web conventions to follow?
The logo links home and sits top-left, search uses a magnifying-glass icon, the cart sits top-right, primary navigation runs across the top, and links are visually distinct. These are patterns nearly every user already expects.
When is it okay to break convention?
When the new pattern is a clear, substantial improvement that outweighs the cost of making every visitor relearn it. The bar is high — novelty for its own sake usually costs more in confusion than it gains in distinction.
Related principles
Users arrive with expectations from past experience — break those without reason and you cause confusion.
Follow platform conventions and stay internally consistent so the same thing always means the same thing.
Users follow the strongest-smelling trail toward their goal — they click links whose labels and context suggest the destination will be relevant, and abandon paths that go cold.
Attribution & sources
Identified by Jakob Nielsen (c. 2000). Catalogued from Laws of UX (Jon Yablonski).
Coined by Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group; popularised for designers by Jon Yablonski's Laws of UX.
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