"Jakob's Law" was proposed by Jakob Nielsen, the founder of Nielsen's Ten Principles and one of the founders of the Nielsen Norman Group.
He believes that Jacob's Law is more like a natural law, just describing a fact, and this fact is that users accumulate experience on thousands of other websites (products), learn how to use websites, when a website is different from other websites When the site is consistent, users will immediately know what to do, but if Jacob's Law is violated, users will not hesitate to leave.
In short, product design needs to reduce the user's learning cost as much as possible, and design tasks and processes based on the user's long-existing user mental model and product realization model.
Because users already spend most of country email list their time with products at the top of the industry, this means that if you want them to enjoy and consistently use your product, your product needs to have the same operating methods and usage patterns as everyone else's.
Comparison of YouTube before and after the revision in 2017, in the new version, the website framework and functions are almost unchanged, but the UI has been adjusted to comply with the new design guidelines, such as adjusting font size, color, column spacing, etc. It is not much different from the old version as a whole, and it also provides users with the choice of the old version.
2. Subtle influence
Following user cognition has a subtle influence on Internet products, which also confirms Nielsen's "Jacob's Law". These "influences" are everywhere in the competition and are in line with design principles and psychology.
1) Consistent conceptual model
The psychological hints given to users by products of the same type tend to be consistent, and similar product implementation models allow users to quickly understand how the product works.
A reasonable conceptual model of social apps will suggest how users develop friendships: precise search → sending friend requests → establishing friend relationships → instant chat → following trends…
Users are deeply impressed by the industry's leading products, realize the education of the model, and establish cognitive and behavioral habits. Therefore, we will find that new products and iterative head products born in the industry follow a consistent conceptual model to avoid the cost of re-education of users.