Here Are Some Tips on Using Jakob's Law in Design

When you spend enough time participating in online forums where web designers and developers congregate, you will certainly see a few projects showcased by members who want opinions about their work. Invariably, you will get tons of honest comments such as: "This looks great, but it also looks like hundreds or thousands of other websites out there."

Let's take the comments above at face value. First of all, they are highly ideal because they conform to Jakob's Law, which states that website visitors who spend a lot of time on about a dozen websites will have formed certain expectations. In other words, these visitors are more likely to prefer sites that look like the ones they are already familiar with.

Based on Jakob's Law, if you are working on a Bootstrap project that looks and feels like Twitter, chances are that it will work for your client. If other web designers feel that your project looks like a block of tract housing or a gated community where the builder only selected two floor plans, but that it looks good nonetheless, you have done your homework.

Jakob's Law is something that other professional fields have to contend with. If you look at the best-selling gated communities of Southwest Florida, you will notice that nearly all of them feature the same Mediterranean revival style of architecture; there may be some splashes of Tuscan, Caribbean, or Spanish Colonial details thrown in for good measure, but the overall look is very similar. This is an example of residential developers playing it safe because they know what prospective buyers want their new homes to look like.

There is a reason why Tesla Motors and other innovative automakers do not want to deviate too much from the four-wheel vehicle formula that has worked for more than a century. The same goes for the standard controls that we are accustomed to. When you apply Jakob's Law to web design, you are appealing to common denominators, and this should be a guiding principle when thinking about the overall user experience of your project. Flashy websites will mostly appeal to other web designers. For more information click here https://i.redd.it/v9hyse0516l61.png.