Jakob’s law proposed by the father of usability, Jakob Nielsen is a concept which recognises users behaviours and expectations when using products. The Law is wholly based on the finding that users spend most of their time on other sites and they prefer new sites to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.
I read the chapter on Jakob’s Law from Jon Yablonski’s Laws of UX: Using Psychology to Design Better Products & Services to gain a better understanding on how using familiarity within UX design is so valuable for a users interaction with your product of service so they are aware of all the options or choices available to them. By using familiarity, it allows a user to use a lower cognitive load and less mental energy is spent when learning a new interface so they can be more dedicate to achieving their objectives and goals easier and have a more successful interaction.
We can do this through the use of mental models, which is what a user automatically thinks they already know about a system, specifically how it works. Whenever we complete an everyday task like using a self service checkout in Tesco, we form a model of how a system works and then we apply that model to new situations where the system is similar such as in other retail shops. These mental models are valuable to us as designers as we can produce designs that match to our users’ mental models to improve their experience as they can easily transfer their knowledge from one product or experience to another, without needing to take the time to learn how it works.
<aside> 💭 I think a great example of this is how Apple heavily used Skeuomorphism across their user interface in the early IOS versions such as the buttons resembling real buttons or photos with white borders looking like physical photographs. This was a bit reason behind why the interface was so intuitive to use by people who had never used a touch-based smartphone before as they were able to use prior knowledge to navigate the device. It can be argued now however that now as people have become as accustomed to smart phones that skeuomorphism is no longer required in modern interface design and that some skeuomorphism can look old fashioned such as a floppy disk icon being used as the save button and is no longer recognised.
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Jon Postel was an American computer scientist who made significant contributions to the underlying protocols that would come to form the internet. The Transmission Control Protocol, the way in which data is sent and received over a network was one of these contributions he made. In this specification Postel introduced what he called the robustness principle which stated that TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness.
Postel’s principle was originally intended to be a guideline for network engineering specifically the TCP. The fault tolerance introduced by the robustness principle helped to ensure nodes on the early internet could communicate reliably but its influence extends beyond just computer network engineering. His philosophy outlined in Postel’s law can also be applied to user experience design and how we deal with user input and system output as designing a good user experience means designing a good human experience however humans and computers communicate and process information in different ways so it’s up to us as designers to bridge the communication gap.
<aside> 💭 It is important as designers that we do bridge this gap and design as good user experience as us as people don’t behave like machines! We are inconsistent, frequently distracted, occasionally error-prone and usually driven by emotion so it is important that the products and services we do interact with are intuitive and understand us. It is good that postels law allows us to test and question things so we can improve this experience and make it more intuitive for us as humans to use.
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Hicks Law, named after British psychologist William Edmund Hick refers to how the time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices available to the user.
We can help decrease decision time by: