Jakob's Law: Design for Familiarity, Not Novelty

Jakob’s Law is a humbling idea for anyone who likes to be original. It says that users spend most of their time on sites other than yours, so they expect your site to work the way all those other sites do. Their expectations about where the logo goes, what a menu looks like, how a cart behaves, and where the search box lives were formed everywhere else, and they arrive at your site carrying those expectations. When you honor them, the site feels intuitive. When you break them to be different, the site feels confusing, and confused visitors do not convert.

Familiar Is Not Boring, It Is Usable

There is a temptation, especially in design-led teams, to treat convention as a lack of imagination and to reinvent standard patterns to stand out. This almost always backfires. When a visitor cannot find the navigation because you hid it somewhere clever, or cannot tell what is clickable because you restyled links beyond recognition, the novelty costs you the conversion. People do not want to learn how to use your website. They want to accomplish something and leave, and familiarity is what lets them do that without friction. This is the same reason copying what genuinely works is a sensible baseline, even though it is only a baseline.

Where Convention Belongs

Use established patterns for the mechanics: navigation, layout, form behavior, icons, the shopping and checkout flow, and anything the visitor needs to operate without thinking. These are not the places to be clever, because the entire value of a convention is that the visitor already knows it. A menu that looks like a menu, a button that looks like a button, and a link that looks like a link remove a whole category of confusion before it starts.

Where Originality Belongs

None of this means your site should be generic, and this is the crucial distinction. Familiarity belongs in the mechanics, but your distinctiveness belongs in the substance: your message, your voice, your visual identity, your proof, the specific value you offer. You can be completely conventional in how the navigation works and completely original in what you say and how you look. The best sites are exactly this: effortless to use because they follow the patterns people know, and memorable because everything inside those patterns is unmistakably theirs.

A Note on Changing Familiar Things

Jakob’s Law also has something to say about redesigns. When you change an interface people already know, even an improvement can feel worse at first, because you have broken the mental model they had learned and forced them to relearn. This does not mean never change anything, it means change with awareness: introduce big shifts gradually where you can, keep what works, and expect a short dip in satisfaction as people adjust, rather than panicking at the first complaint. The strongest redesigns preserve the familiar structure users rely on and improve within it, rather than reinventing everything at once and stranding the people who had finally gotten comfortable. Familiarity is an asset you have built up in your users’ heads, and it is worth spending carefully rather than throwing away for novelty.

The Takeaway

Jakob’s Law tells you where to spend your creativity and where to save it. Do not make people relearn how a website works, because they will not thank you for it, they will leave. Be conventional in the plumbing and original in the message. Familiar mechanics plus distinctive substance is the combination that is both easy to use and impossible to forget.

If your site is clever in the wrong places, we can help you rebalance it.