Jakob’s Law (AKA If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!)

What is it: Jakob’s Law suggests that as we spend most of our time on ‘other systems’ (paraphrasing, I know), we ought to design interactions that users expect and not make them think too hard…

“If it isn’t broken, why are you fixing it. Oh, and because you can, isn’t a good enough reason!”

Overview

I have intentionally, in the heading above, used the word ‘system’, as I am aware that a lot of people have heard of Jakob’s Law in the sphere of digital user experience (UX). However, I’m broadening this out to suggest that if we want to break the norms of any system, concept or ‘accepted way of doing things’, we’d better have a really good reason for doing it.

In so many areas of life, we are on ‘autopilot’, and that relies on us learning how to do new things, and once they have become relatively sub-conscious, not having to re-learn them. This works for UX, physical interaction with out surroundings, social norms and especially in communication and business. These are called ‘mental models’.

Remember when Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng decided to dispense with the norms of fiscal policy. Yes, you do, your mortgage got more expensive and your pension nosedived. Anyway, I digress.

Jakob’s Law, proposed by Jakob Neilsen, suggests that (in UX design), don’t dispense with accepted norms or mental models, because your visitors are spending most of their time on other websites that do adhere to norms, and if you arbitrarily decide to change these norms, you’re asking your users to re-learn something. And they don’t like that. It’s called cognitive load, or, the rest of us call it thinking too hard.

Jakob’s Law suggests that we adhere to norms, models and standards to make it easier to think about what matters, in ecommerce terms, that means buying stuff! We don’t want to have to re-learn how to search or try and figure out new navigation or structural concepts when we’re meant to be in buying mode. If you make the users of your system think too hard, they’ll go elsewhere.

When I try to explain this, I use a more physical example, doors. When we approach a new door, what do we do? Well, I’ll tell you, we instinctively know what if there is a handle, we’re more likely that not to have to use it to pull the door. Trust me, I’ve watched people doing it. If there isn’t a handle, we tend to push it. It’s funny to watch people trying to open a door by pulling the handle when it opens inwards! Why do we do this? It’s a subconscious routine, we’ve learned through norms.

So, having to re-learn new ways of doing things that have become unconscious, is bad.

There are a number of stages by which we learn and adopt skills to become subconscious. I’ll do a full article soon, but here are the basics:

1. we are not conscious of not knowing something – we don’t know we need to learn something
2. we become consciously incompetent – we know we need to learn a new skill
3. we’ve learned that skill and are aware we’re doing it – we’re consciously competent
4. we forget that we’re doing something subconsciously and become unaware that it’s subconscious – because we forget to keep our skills up to date, this is quite dangerous, but only if we’re driving, not using a website!

When we create norms, we’re allowing our users to act subconsciously. When we change those norms, people don’t like it.

What can we do to avoid this?

Well, here is the thing. If we never change things, things simply won’t ever get better. If Henry Ford hadn’t changed design and production processes, would we have seen the explosion in vehicle ownership? If Steve Jobs hadn’t conceptualised (I don’t say ‘designed’ because that’s a disservice to Jonathan Ives), would we have had smartphones in the 2000s? Someone has to create genuinely new ideas!

That said, the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mantra is so important. I’ve worked with numerous UX designers, who, despite my best efforts, insist on changing things, because, well, they think it they aren’t changing something they don’t have a job! Improving things is a slightly different point. If you believe you can improve something, do it. Just make the user experience more pleasing. Speed up interaction times (see the Doherty Threshold) or reduce the number of steps, levels or make forms more intuitive or auto-filled.

Just don’t invent a whole new ‘norm’ and expect us to ‘get it’ immediately. We won’t, we’ll just go and find someone else who makes it easier for us.

Examples

• If, like me, you’ve ever watched users in UX labs trying to use mega-menus, you’ll know what I mean. The norm on websites is to click on user controls, so why do some site developers use a mouseover to show/hide a mega-menu. As you move your cursor over the menu, it appears and as you almost instantaneously click it (because that’s what you’re used to), it disappears again. This is the single most annoying user error I see and if you can’t get your users into your store pages, they will just move on.
• I am seeing more and more ‘unique’ ecommerce site shopping cart icons. Since the 2000s, users have expected to see a cart or basket icon (I don’t know why, even in the UK, we prefer the American cart over basket). Why create a shopping bag icon, the invariably doesn’t look like a bag when your users are looking for the checkout via a cart/basket icon. Stick with what they’re instinctively looking for, you can still have some creative freedom, but buying stuff is kind of the most important part of your ecommerce site.