While using a product, users expect that they will be able to find the required information and actions quickly. Since they have been using other products throughout their day, when they visit your product, they prefer that your product will also work in the same way as the others do. Hence, familiarity and adherence to conventions are important levers to improve user experience. These levers ensure that your product is high on:
- Learnability: a measure of how quickly the users can understand your product and start using it.
- Memorability: a measure of how easily the users can recall how to use the product when they revisit it after some time.
The above is called Jakob’s Law, which was formulated by the usability expert Jakob Nielsen in 2000. It tends to create subconscious muscle movements when a user is using the products as per the knowledge from other products they are well aware of.
Please note: Jakob’s Law does not promote that all competitive products should have an identical user experience. It provides guidance to product managers and designers by highlighting that the users utilize the knowledge from past experiences to understand new experiences. For example:
- Icons are used as metaphors like search, save, user, etc are understood by users.
- Standard interaction paradigms like hamburger navigations, horizontal scrolling, expand-collapse, etc are easily understood by users.
- Grayed-out buttons are assumed to be disabled, hence, users might not even click on them
- Users tend to ignore banners like real-estate in products (also called banner blindness), leading to lower click-through rate (CTR) on advertisements.
Following are three examples of how Jakob's Law has been applied in daily used products in a competitive landscape. This makes it easy for the users switching between the apps to use the respective apps with reduced cognitive load.
#1 Ecommerce Apps (Flipkart, Meesho, Amazon)
- Main navigation as a bottom bar near the periphery of the thumb.
- Search being provided with a visual hierarchy on the top due to high usage.
- Voice search and image search option on the right corner of the main search box, since users scan from left to right (in most cultures).
#2 News Apps (Mint, The Hindu, Hindustan Times)
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- Most visited pages are present in the bottom navigation.
- Secondary navigation is present in the hamburger menu.
- Logo is placed near the hamburger menu on the top left.
- News topics navigation is present in the top navbar, providing easy access to the specific theme of news.
#3 Hyperlocal Delivery Apps (Instamart, Zepto, Blinkit)
- Delivery address on the top left, prominent position for eye scan, as the stores and thus inventory is powered as per the selected address.
- Search bar prominent on the top to begin a purchase journey quickly.
- Recommendation widget with Add button in the first fold to nudge repeat orders.
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