When driving, you’re pretty used to seeing the red octagon used universally in America for the stop sign. This is an agreed-upon color and shape combination, indicating a driver needs to stop before passing through the intersection. You know to stop without even having to read the sign itself. Now, imagine you’re driving through a small town. They decided their stop sign would be a yellow circle since they felt the yellow was easier to see.
Someone who is a part of their city council voted yes to this motion and is aware that the new stop sign is a yellow circle since they had input in making that decision. However, when you have outside drivers enter the town, they will be quite confused and may not even take notice of the stop signs at all since they are so conditioned to look for the red octagon. This only causes difficulty and confusion for anyone outside that community to try and decipher the signage around them.
Web Design & Jakob’s Law
The above scenario is an example of Jakob’s Law. Users spend most of their time interacting with other sites, and your site should function largely the same. This isn’t to say your site can’t be unique – the town can still put in beautiful roadside shrubberies to spruce up the area, but that improvement becomes confusing when they change the universally agreed-upon signage.
This principle is very important when it comes to site design. You have a set of standard icons and flows people are used to. For instance, the save icon has been a floppy disk for years. It is based on a saving device used at the dawn of the computing age to store data. It was phased out and replaced with things like cloud storage and USB drives. However, the floppy disk remains the seemingly ubiquitous symbol for saving around the web. Some kids now might not be able to recognize a physical floppy disk, but they know what the save icon looks like.
Since the floppy disk icon is so ingrained in our minds as save, if you were creating a new word processor software and decided to have a circle with a checkmark inside it as the new save icon, many people wouldn’t be able to use it without getting some tutorial or walkthrough of the software. Even then, their subconscious mind will still search for that floppy disk icon to save the document.
For web design
Like the above examples, many things in web design are standard. There’s no sense in reinventing the wheel if people won’t know how to use it anyway. More often than not, people aren’t going to want to learn it either, and they will find a site with a similar service and use that since it’s more comfortable.
This can be used to your advantage as well. Consider how you can make your users more apt to adapt to your site if you want to diverge from the norm or keep along common guidelines of general iconography and layout to maximize your usability. This creates more trust in the users since they will feel confident using your site. Again, this isn’t to say you still can’t break the boundaries of your standard web design. Like with the shrubbery installations in the town, these elements can help to beautify without mitigating the usability.
Focus on maintaining core processes, for instance, on eCommerce sites. If you were to switch the steps where you review your items by entering your payment information, customers would likely be offended and decide not to proceed with their order. However, if you have a groundbreaking idea for your product page layout that you think will increase the ease of use while still employing common iconography and eCommerce flows, that’s a great place to innovate.
Innovate, but don’t reinvent the wheel
As designers, we love to push the boundaries, but as user experience designers, we want the best for our users. We must balance adding elements to enhance the experience and not detract from usability. Remember, most people spend their time on websites other than yours. They are more likely to navigate towards something else if it doesn’t function similarly.
Contact Perfect Afternoon for assistance
Our design team can help you determine the best steps for your website to incorporate Jakob’s Law. Contact us today to set up a discovery meeting.
Photo Credits: Unsplash
