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Users’ love for the well-known
When it comes to User Experience Design, many theories and methodological patterns have emerged over the past centuries. By now, the discipline has developed a body of knowledge that does not only help to push the theoretical boundaries of the field, but also gives guidance to UX designers, UX researchers and UX writers. Within this knowledge, certain principles seem to be more or less a mere deduction of common sense for even inexperienced UXers, while other principles are highly controversial.
Jakob’s Law is a principle that pretty much qualifies for both categories.
What is Jakob’s Law?
Now, first things first: When creating digital interfaces — be it an embedded interface in a physical product, a mobile, desktop or web app, or any other service — it is essential to follow certain principles that help to create a highly usable interface. These principles are based on the understanding of human behaviour and the psychology behind it. This understanding allows us to predict how a user may interact with the interface, which helps us to make design decisions accordingly. While the merely theoretical reference of design principles cannot replace user research and testing, it can indeed reduce the number of iterations needed to ultimately create an interface with good usability.
Jakob’s law is one of the most common principles to be used as guidance for designing digital interfaces. It was originally created by Jakob Nielsen, principal and co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group. According to Nielsen, the law can be defined as the following:
“Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”
In other words: Users will find it easier to navigate through an interface, when the UX Design of it resembles the one they know from other interfaces, as the well-known pattern make them feel safe and secure. Familiarity gives users confidence and encourages them to interact with the interface.
Nielsen continues by highlighting the aspect of consistency in front of this background, emphasizing the importance of meeting the expectations that users have of an interface, based on the interfaces they have seen before:
“Consistency is one of the most powerful usability principles: when things always behave the same, users don’t have to worry about what will happen. Instead, they know what will happen based on earlier experience. […] Users form their expectations for your site based on what’s commonly done on most other sites. If you deviate, your site will be harder to use and users will leave.”
This idea is also manifested in one of the Nielsen Norman Group’s well-known usability heuristics (i.e. an approach on how to improve usability) “Consistency and Standards”, which can be divided into internal and external consistency. In this, Nielsen gives much room to the aspect of integrating “standard” patterns into UX Design, for the sake of user comfort.
Jakob’s Law and psychology
With his consistency-based theory, Nielsen is in good company. In psychology and cognitive neuroscience, many other theories, approaches, and principles support the above principles, and hence, Jakob’s Law.
One of the most basic parts of our psychological understanding of human perception that supports Jakob’s Law is pattern recognition. Pattern recognition is a cognitive process that allows us to match the information from a stimulus with information retrieved from what we have stored in their memory. (Eysenck, Michael W.; Keane, Mark T. (2003). Cognitive Psychology: A Student’s Handbook (4th ed.)) The basic approach is described as a kind of a template-based matching model: We store templates formed from our past living experiences, and, when our senses detect an outside stimulus, this stimulus will be compared to all those stored templates in order to find the best matching pair. If there is no matching pair, we are unsure about what to do with the stimulus, because we have not developed a behavioral pattern matching the simulus. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1007/BF02833890?needAccess=true)
As Product Designer Imra Ali puts it:
”Recognizing patterns and similarities allows people to predict what’s coming next. Recognition occurs by recalling semantic memory which is implemented by constant repetition of the stimulus.”
Today, our brain is well-conditioned by this principle, which is proven by several psychological phenomena. One of them is called Apophenia — the human tendency to see patterns that do not actually exist. Another phenomenon is the mere-exposure effect, which got popular through the work of Robert Zajonc in the 1960’s: Zajonc observed that exposure to a novel stimulus initially elicits a fear/avoidance response in all organisms.
How does users’ love for familiarity _really _affect User Experience Design?
Long story short: people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar to them. For User Experience Design, this knowledge gives clear guidance: Creating an interface based on existing patterns, allows the user to focus on completing tasks, rather than learning new patterns. For the practical context of designing an e-commerce platform, this means, for example, that you should probably stick to placing a shopping cart button in the top right corner, simply because almost all other platforms do so and the user will thus expect the button to be there and initially look for it exactly in that spot.
However, taking Jakob’s Law as a call to copy everything from any of your most loved websites or apps and simply adding your CI to it will in most cases not lead to a great User Experience. So, shouldn’t we as designers question the Jakob’s Law’s usefulness in the first place?
Well, not so fast.
There are two reasons why adhering to Jakob’s law to the most part doesn’t necessarily lead to a boring UX.
You can create a very unique experience based on an interface concept that is mostly constructed from established patterns, e.g. by creating a unique design language amongst other things.
There are many cases in which you can and should break with existing patterns if there is a good argument for it.
Let’s dive a little deeper.
The whole is more than the sum of its parts
First of all, combining patterns to design an interface for your specific context, even when those patterns are already well established, already results in something new and unique. This is especially true because, in User Experience design, it is all about context. Our job as UX Designers is to find the best interface patterns for our own, very specific context. This context is usually made up of the following three areas:
The brand & the product
The product’s (potential) market
The user(s)
The one we most strongly focus on as UX Designers is the user. Thinking about the context here means we have to bear in mind that different target groups have different experience backgrounds and thus have different templates in their minds that they compare our interface to. Hence, we need to pick from patterns that suit the respective target group best, or we even need to use different patterns within a single interface to offer different interaction possibilities for different target groups for the same product. One case that comes to mind here is offering an assisted flow for inexperienced users while offering shortcuts for more experienced users at the same time.
Taking a closer look at the other two named areas, the brand and the product’s market, makes it apparent that the patterns we choose for a mobile game probably differ profoundly from those we would use for the embedded interface in a car.
Moreover, there is a lot of room for uniqueness when choosing forms, colors, fonts, animations, tone of voice, sounds, illustrations and other aspects of a design language. At COBE, we uncompromisingly derive the design of every single atom of an interface, every microinteraction, every element of microcopy from the respective brand and its values. We have established and validated a method for this process over the past eight years, which is called UXi (User Experience Identity). Designing with the help of the UXi approach ensures that every detail of an interface tells the story of the corresponding brand. This so-called hedonic quality of a product’s design complements the merely functional quality a product’s design. While the latter improves the usability of the interface, hedonic quality will upgrade the User Experience and make the product stand out from the crowd, as brand-driven UX design creates emotional relationships, thus relevance and attention.
For detailed information on the development, the validation, and the usage of the UXi method, check out our website or read our latest book on the topic.
It’s okay to deviate from standards, when it serves the user
Secondly, it is okay to leave standard patterns behind for the sake of a great User Experience. In the context of mobile app design, Google’s Material Design and Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines do a great job in raising the bar of usability standards. However, we have to keep in mind that both are not the holy grail, i.e. the ultimate truth, of great UX design. Take for example the iOS barrel picker, which can be very tedious to use when selecting something from a very long list of items, since there are only very few items in the viewport, and you have no indication of how long the list is.
From a UX point of view this is a clear case: Even for date picking, the use of a number pad in combination with three input fields for the day, the month, and the year, within which the cursor automatically jumps to the next field, may provide a better usability than a barrel picker. At the same time, for the case of a selection from very few items, this pattern provides good usability. As we learned: It is all about context.
Also, both operating systems obviously underlie constant change: Both systems converge more and more and keep absorbing patterns from each other that proved useful. As an example, iOS introduced a generic gesture for going back one step, an option which Android has provided for a long time with its classic permanent back button. In another example, the latest Android version introduced more or less the same interactions to switch between applications, go to the home screen, and also go back one step via gestures, that iOS uses, replacing the permanent hard/soft keys.
In your daily practice of UX design, you may not only find a greatly working pattern outside these frameworks. You might as well develop a new and innovative approach that solves a common problem better than well established patterns. It may even be so superior to existing solutions that its benefits outweigh the additional cognitive load the user has to manage in order to learn something new. Apart from the fact that we can reduce such cognitive load by introducing various onboarding techniques, it is important to show the user new solutions — not only to help them solve their problems more efficiently, but also to avoid a standstill regarding usability.
Also, in your very own product context, you may be more flexible concerning the introduction of new patterns, because it has less negative impact: While in gaming interfaces, new interaction patterns are presumably well-accepted by the often technophile target audience, the interface of medical equipment is probably not the right place to play around with new patterns.
Conclusion
So how can we answer the question of whether or not the preference for established patterns will reduce innovation in User Experience Design? Of course, as a designer, you do not want to build products that are too difficult to use, because they deviate too strongly from expected norms. Or, as Jakob Nielsen describes it, you don’t want “an anthill built by ants on LSD”. Therefore, it is definitely a good thing to stick to Jakob’s Law, when the target group (user), the market position, and the product requires it. However, scratching only the surface of this law may have us designers end up as copycats, blindly reusing what others have used, just for the sake of familiarity. This will results in a bad experience.
So, when being confronted with such laws, dig a little deeper and see whether and how such laws really apply to your own context. At the same time, always feed your hunger for creating something new by challenging existing patterns and by questioning whether we might be able to find a superior solution compared to what is already out there. One amazing and fun way to challenge obvious and often-used solutions is, for example, using creative techniques such as Five Whys.
Also, always keep in mind to refine your experience with an identity, with a specific heart and soul, that is consistent with the language your brand speaks. As digital products have become a substantial part of our everyday life, we expect interfaces to interact with us more uniquely, and we want to recognize our little digital companions by their look and feel and by the way they talk to us, and just like the people that surround us, the interfaces of the products that we use on a daily basis become familiar to us. So: Dare to create your own well-known!
If you are interested in other principles of UX, Laws of UX is a great source: https://lawsofux.com.
Laws of UX is a collection of best practices that designers can consider when building user interfaces.
ALLHEURISTICPRINCIPLEGESTALTCOGNITIVE BIAS
Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable.
HEURISTIC
Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace (<400ms) that ensures that neither has to wait on the other.
PRINCIPLE
The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
HEURISTIC
The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.
HEURISTIC
Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.
HEURISTIC
Elements tend to be perceived into groups if they are sharing an area with a clearly defined boundary.
GESTALT
Objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together.
GESTALT
People will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images as the simplest form possible, because it is the interpretation that requires the least cognitive effort of us.
GESTALT
The human eye tends to perceive similar elements in a design as a complete picture, shape, or group, even if those elements are separated.
GESTALT
Elements that are visually connected are perceived as more related than elements with no connection.
GESTALT
The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory.
HEURISTIC
Among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.
PRINCIPLE
The Pareto principle states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
PRINCIPLE
People judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak and at its end, rather than the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.
COGNITIVE BIAS
Users have a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a series.
COGNITIVE BIAS
Tesler's Law, also known as The Law of Conservation of Complexity, states that for any system there is a certain amount of complexity which cannot be reduced.
PRINCIPLE
The Von Restorff effect, also known as The Isolation Effect, predicts that when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered.
COGNITIVE BIAS
People remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.
COGNITIVE BIAS
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