15 · Deciding
Jakob's Law
People expect a new site to behave like the ones they already use every day.
Evidence: Rule of thumbWhat we do with it
- 01
Use the patterns people already know. The logo goes home. The cart lives top right.
- 02
Before designing, look at the three sites your users spend the most time on. Their conventions are your users' expectations.
- 03
Be original where people came for something, and conventional where they're trying to get something done.
Examples
Getting it wrong, getting it right.
Don't
A store that puts the cart at the bottom left and uses a custom icon for it, to stand out.
Do
The cart top right, as a cart. Spend the originality on the products and the photography.
Don't
A redesign that swaps every screen overnight, so regular users lose their way on day one.
Do
A redesign that ships in stages, with an easy way back to the old layout for the first few weeks.
The evidence
What the research says.
Jakob Nielsen stated it in 2000 from years of watching people use websites. It was never an experiment. UX research backs it up. Sandra Roth and colleagues had 516 people lay out web pages in 2010 and found firm, shared expectations: the logo top left, the cart top right, the search box near the top. And in Alexandre Tuch and colleagues' 2012 study, people judged websites in 50 milliseconds, and the ones that looked like a typical site of their kind were rated more appealing.
Sources
- Nielsen, J. (2000). End of web design. Alertbox column, July 2000.
- Roth, S. P., Schmutz, P., Pauwels, S. L., Bargas-Avila, J. A., & Opwis, K. (2010). Mental models for web objects: Where do users expect to find the most frequent objects in online shops, news portals, and company web pages? Interacting with Computers, 22(2).
- Tuch, A. N., Presslaber, E. E., Stöcklin, M., Opwis, K., & Bargas-Avila, J. A. (2012). The role of visual complexity and prototypicality regarding first impression of websites: Working towards understanding aesthetic judgments. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 70(11).
Last reviewed November 7, 2026. How we keep this current