Jakob’s Law of Familiar Expectations: Why the Search Icon is Shaped Like a Magnifying Glass?
The intersection between UX Design and Psychology:
Psychology is all about the scientific exploration of the wonders of the mind and understanding why we think the way we think. It's about asking why we feel a certain way. Why do we feel happy when we gulp down a scoop of our favorite ice cream? Why do we grieve upon the loss of a loved one? Why do we feel irritated by our nosy neighbors? Why do we feel jealous of our rich friends in Bali?
Psychology helps us to understand why people behave the way they do in certain situations. Why do they react in a certain way? Research in this field helps us unravel inherent patterns in human beings that further helps us understand their problems and offer better solutions for a better quality of life.
But why am I telling you this? How is understanding psychology going to help in creating better digital products? Or better digital interfaces? Or better user experiences? Or better UX/UI of our apps and websites?
Let's apply some common sense here. UX Design is all about enhancing the digital experience for a user who's interacting with a digital interface, right? And psychology is the study of the user's behavior and emotions, right?
So, if we use the authentic studies previously concluded by psychologists to create UX designs that are way more user-centric, with way more empathy for the users, won't that be a lifesaver?
But what are those studies? When am I going to reveal those laws? Right here, right now!
Here's a list of 10 time-tested powerful laws in UX based on psychological concepts that go way beyond the field of computers:
- Jakob’s Law of Familiar Expectations
- Fitts’s Law of Acquiring Targets
- Hick’s Law of Temporal Variability of Choices
- Miller’s Law of Short Term Memory Capacity
- Postel’s Law of Empathic Inputs and Conservative Outputs
- Peak–End Rule of Memorable Experiences
- Aesthetic–Usability Effect of Visual Design
- Von Restorff Effect of Remembering Contrasting Elements
- Tesler’s Law or the law of conservation of complexity
- Doherty Threshold of Increased Productivity with Instant Feedback
So. What are you waiting for?
To save time, jump to a section from:
Hurry Now! Continue reading to know all about these laws* and how various products are already leveraging their potential to create mind-blowing UX Designs.
*Since I wanted to make this knowledge digestible, I've divided the 10 laws into 10 different blog posts. Here in this post, we'll be talking about the first and most important law, Jakob's law!
Stay tuned for the rest of the 9 laws!
Law Number 1:
The Jakob’s Law of Familiar Expectations
1. Brief Overview of Jakob's Law
People all over the internet are using some kind of website or app. They expect your website or app to work in a similar manner to the ones they're already familiar with.
We love familiarity and consistency in our lives. It helps us free our minds and make space for important decisions. Without this, we'll be stressed and frustrated with the most insignificant decisions in our lives.
Imagine you had to discover the door handle to enter your home every single time because it changed its position.
Or more realistically, let's say you visit 5 of your close friends in the next week and you discover that the door knobs of all of their houses are in different locations.
Imagine every smartphone on our planet had a different charging port. What a mess it would be!
Now let's consider the digital realm. Imagine every time you landed on a new website and wanted to search for a keyword, you had to deliberately search for the search icon.
Sometimes it was at the top right. Sometimes right at the bottom of the page. Sometimes it was embedded in the sidebar. Sometimes it appeared only when you scrolled halfway down. Sometimes it was a different icon than the ancient magnifying glass.
Again. What a mess it would be! The amount of cognitive load on your brain would be terrible.
Here comes Jakob's law to rescue. It says that when we employ familiarity in our design across different interfaces, it helps the users to navigate and interact with the products or services with much ease. Users will have to use less amount of mental energy to understand the interface and more energy to actually achieve their goals on the site. The visual cues will allow users to divert their efforts from processing the layout and processing them to successfully completing their online journey.
It is the responsibility of UX designers and Product Development teams to make the lives of their users a bit easier. By getting rid of unnecessary hurdles and inconsistencies.
This is majorly possible by leveraging the power of famous design systems and standards that guide the standard placement of icons, links, headers, footers, navigation panels, web page or app screen structure, and so on.
The design systems guide users to focus on their objectives on the web page or app screen without first expecting them to fully understand the layout or how the interface works.
2. The Origins Story of Jakob's Law
Okay, we're not going to get a history lesson here but knowing the origins of every law can be pretty exciting!
Did you know this law is also known as 'The Jakob's Law of Internet User Experience'?
On a fine summer afternoon in the year 2000, our usability expert Jakob Neilsen studied the different user experiences and concluded that people have a strong tendency to expect similar design conventions as they've accumulated from the cumulative experience of multiple websites in the past.
Think of it this way. You tend to listen to songs and music that's familiar to your mind. Research has proven that we seldom listen to music that's not familiar to us. While commuting back from work, you, a folk music lover, would not want a rock music album to play on repeat. Similar is the case with our cumulative experiences of digital interfaces.
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Neilsen went a step further and declared it a law of human nature. He advised designers to adopt conventional systems in their designs and avoid unconventional ones. Because unconventional systems can be frustrating for users, they make them peel their skin off, can make them drop their online tasks, and ultimately run away from their computers.
Why? Because the unconventional systems don't overlap with their existing understanding of how websites and apps should function. This is known as inconsistencies with their existing mental models. One of the most important psychological concepts to be used to design better user experiences.
3. Psychological Concept behind Jakob's Law
Consider this scenario. You want to warm your lunch in the office cafeteria. You're thinking about how to warm it.
You'll take out the lunchbox from your bag. You'll locate glass or ceramic utensils. You'll transfer the contents from your steel tiffin box to the ceramic ones. You'll locate the microwave oven. It's probably similar to the one you have at home. You'll open its door, keep the lunch in a ceramic bowl inside the microwave, and close its door. Now you'll hit the timer button and then the start button. I doubt you've ever used any other button on a microwave. That's it, you'll wait for the timer to go off indicated by the beep sound.
This was a mental model. It's what you think you know about how a particular system works. These systems can be physical ones like waiting to check out in a grocery store or digital ones like completing an online check-out process to order your favorite ice cream!
The funny thing about mental models is that they behave like templates inside our memories. Once we form a mental model, our brains are too adamant to let them go. Once formed, our brain applies the same model to different situations with similar expectations. If the expectations are met, the UX is successful. If not, the user gets frustrated.
It's pretty much commonsense. We tend to employ the knowledge we have gained from our previous experiences while interacting with a new one! And why shouldn't we? It helps us reduce the cognitive load on our memories!
UX Designers can leverage the potential of existing mental models created by conventional design, systems to create a comfortable user experience.
Designers should first understand their user's mental models, instead of reinventing the wheel or sticking to their personal mental models. But how?
How do we get inside the brain of our users and read their mental models?
Through user research techniques! Such as creating user personas, conducting user interviews, creating user journey maps, making empathy maps, identifying their pain points, knowing what all digital products or services they've been using, and a lot more!
The ultimate goal behind the above activities is to unravel their existing mental models. And then understanding how they can be applied to the new products that are being created.
Since we're now familiar with the psychological concept of mental models behind Jakob's law, it's time to see this law in action! Because until and unless we see its practical use, our understanding will remain restricted to psychological theory. UX designers need to study as many examples as possible to be able to apply these laws!
4. Examples of Jakob's Law in Action
Ever wondered why there's a shopping cart on eCommerce websites?
Why is the call icon still shaped like an old telephone even though we got rid of them years ago?
Why is the save icon still shaped like a floppy disk on every office application? Why is the folder shaped like a literal folder?
Ever thought about why the checkboxes, radio buttons, and on-off switches on digital products are shaped in a particular way? Why do they resemble the physical control panels of the 1900s?
Why is the e-mail icon shaped like traditional mail? Is the home icon like a literal home?
Okay enough with iconography.
Have you ever wondered why on earth every website and app has an almost similar-looking layout? There's a navigation panel with home, about, blog, contact us, and a search bar. Then there's a three-line hamburger menu that expands to give more links. There's a header and a footer. And what else? Every eCommerce website looks the same with different products!
Is it the death of creativity for designers? Have our designers lost all innovation? No. This is purely done to align the products with the users existing mental models of online interactions. By using Google's Material Design System or Apple's Design Guidelines or Microsoft Design System or other similar design systems, users are able to tap into their familiar mental models. It helps them get onto the site and expect the navigation to be where they expect it to be, and finally focus on the site's main content or service.
Often certain companies commit grave blunders of transforming the entire UI without previous gradual changes. Snapchat did this when they changed their UI and the existing users got too frustrated that they lashed it out onto the company's Twitter account.
Instagram recently updated its UI and embedded the captions onto the posts. It was a nightmare to read the captions that appeared all over the posts. Thankfully they rolled back the update to the previous version where the captions were below the images on a plain background.
Drastic changes in UX or UI can lead to tremendous disturbance in the user's experience and ultimately can lead them to bounce off the product.
Honestly, if had Instagram not rolled back their update, I would've uninstalled it. Users don't care about being loyal to your product. If the experience is mentally tiring or mismatched with their existing mental models, they quit.
Subtle gradual changes can be useful to build new and improved mental models like when Google rolled out its new Material Design. They waited for their users to adapt and then gradually released changes that didn't disrupt their existing mental models.
If the changes are too drastic, they can cause mental model discordance. This occurs when a sudden change in the existing mental model impacts and slows down the speed of our users because of misalignment. They’re now not able to perceive the new design as well as unable to complete the tasks that they were once able to.
Look at the consistent experience of all social media platforms. You know how to post, the reels feature is similar in all of them, and content can be posted with a consistent theme on all! Had all these companies quarreled to create totally different UI UX, imagine how difficult it would've been to use daily!
Do you want some examples from the physical world where Jakob's law is applied? Go and pick up any gaming mouse in your nearest store. Look at the position of the extra buttons on the mouse. They're placed right underneath the natural resting position of your hand on the mouse. All the buttons are easily accessible by your right thumb or your middle finger.
Had they placed the buttons near your wrist or worse, underneath the mouse? You would've thrown the mouse on your screen while gaming. But no. The product designers had the patience to study the existing mental models of professional gamers and identified the location that would be most easily accessible.
Here's another example where the seat controls in the Mercedes Benz EQC 400 prototype have taken cues from the mental model of an already existing seat on which the driver is sitting. The design of the button allows the users to clearly understand which part of their seat the corresponding button will adjust.
5. Ways to Implement Jakob's Law
Build informative User Personas
Designers are wild creatures that need to be self-tamed. They're daydreamers and narcissistic because at times they believe they're artists. They're able to create. They're able to build something incredible from scratch. This leaves them vulnerable to falling in love with their own ideas. But UX design is not about designers, it’s about users.
Building a strong research-based user persona is an effective tool to guide the entire design process toward the user. Their primary purpose is to document the needs, motivations, lifestyle, goals, objectives, and aspirations of the target audience. This helps designers to understand their mental models which can be used to frame the new products.
Without a solid user persona based on a specific user, designers won’t know what their users would’ve expected. Therefore a persona is built from the frame of reference of the user to uncover their motivations and fears.
Some of the common topics to be included in a user persona:
User Info:
A photograph, name, age, location, occupation, etc. that gives a first impression of the user. This hypothetical persona is created to give a realistic representation of a chunk of the individuals of a specific group within the target audience. Thus, this factual data should reflect their similarities.
User Details:
Include a user biodata to create a strong narrative of the user. List their behavioral qualities, ones that are relevant and useful to the product. Enlist any frustrations or pain points this specific group faces right now.
Do they have difficulty ordering in bulk? Do they have to find it difficult to understand the forms? You can include additional details such as motivations, goals, or any task flow they currently follow with an existing app or website. Our goal here is to create empathy for the users and align our focus with the factors that will ultimately impact the design of the product or service.
User Insights:
Straightaway adds the relevant quotes from user research in the initial phases of design. This will help designers to create an image of their user’s attitudes. This provides context and we’re able to understand the mindset of the user.
6. Key Considerations while Applying Jakob's Law
Agreed. We’re all worried about the world wide web is full of websites that look and behave exactly in the same manner. Similar goes for the app stores. Almost all the apps nowadays look and feel the same way.
This similarity is due to the following reasons majorly: popular design systems and frameworks that are built to boost the design and development speed and process; the design standards and digital web and app platforms; and our client’s adamant demands to beat their competition in sales.
But imagine suddenly you land on the internet and somehow all the websites have a different layout. Won’t that be frustrating? You’ll have to try really hard to find the navigation panel and the search icon and the shopping cart button on every different website you visit. Your focus will divert from actually completing the task to first understanding the layout. It’ll be a nightmare!
But this doesn’t mean designers can’t or shouldn’t innovate. There’s an appropriate place and time for everything. While the conventional systems shouldn’t be drastically altered, gradual changes can be adopted with sufficient usability testing.
Context should be taken into consideration while tampering with the mental models of users.
7. Summary of Jakob's Law in UX Design
Jakob’s law doesn’t state that every digital interface should be the same. This would be monotonous and utterly boring. This law is merely a guiding star that states that people have a tendency to leverage their past experiences to make sense of new ones.
Do you learn a new language by translating the new one into the old one, or do you learn the new one alone? You learn a new subject by associating the new concepts with the ones you’ve learned earlier. Association with past experiences is something our brains are wired to take advantage of.
These past experiences in the digital world, help them focus on their tasks instead of wasting mental energy grasping the unconventional layout.
Takeaways from Jakob’s law in UX Design
- Begin with standard conventions and existing design systems to tap into the user’s past mental models.
- Deviate from the conventions only if you have a strong reason to do so, and if it improves the user experience in one way or the other.
- Test the unconventional approach with users to understand if and how it works, before going into production.
- Humans have a tendency to transfer their existing expectations they’ve woven around a familiar product or service, to a different one that seems similar to them.
- We can leverage the existing mental models of our users to create enhanced user interfaces where they can focus on completing their desired tasks rather than creating a new mental model around a new product.
- If and when it’s necessary to make transformations in the UX or UI of a digital platform, empower your users by giving them a choice to use the familiar version for a limited time until they adapt to the new one. This reduces the mental model discordance which can hamper their user experience.
