Design Crazy: S1 E4: The Crazy Design Blog by the humans @ Devfasttt!

Hello Humans to this blog, where we Justify Jakob's Law😛

Backstory time: Jakob Nielsen, a User Advocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group, which he co-founded with Dr. Donald A. Norman (former VP of research at Apple Computer), coined the phrase "Jakob's Law". Dr. Nielsen founded the 'discount usability engineering' movement to improve user interfaces quickly and cheaply, and he invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation.

So back to the topic at hand... What is the Jakob's Law? Users spend the majority of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to function in the same way as all the other sites they are familiar with.

This law also applies to mobile applications and other digital products. By understanding Jakob's Law and designing interfaces that are consistent with users' existing mental models, designers can create interfaces that are more intuitive and easy to use.

It's important to note that Jakob's Law is not meant to discourage innovation or creativity, but to provide a foundation of familiar design patterns to build on, so users can quickly understand and start to use a new digital product or service.

So the Key takeaways for you:

🏡Visitors will transfer their expectations from one familiar product to others that bear any resemblance to it whatsoever.

🧠💻We can create superior user experiences by leveraging existing mental models, allowing users to focus on their tasks rather than learning new models.

🦕When making changes, minimize discord by empowering users to continue using a familiar version for a limited time.