Why Most UX Design Shouldn’t Surprise Anyone

Jacob’s Law is one of those rules in UX that doesn’t seem groundbreaking at first—until you realize how many designers ignore it.

“Users spend most of their time on other websites. This means they prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”
— Jakob Nielsen

It’s about expectations. If you’ve used the internet for even a week, you’ve learned that certain things work in predictable ways: logos go to homepages, shopping carts sit in the top-right, links are underlined, and a hamburger menu hides navigation on mobile.

Now imagine a product that flips all of that around just to be clever. Users land on it and pause. They click the wrong thing. They wonder why the search icon takes them somewhere unexpected. It doesn’t feel innovative—it just feels wrong.

That’s the danger of ignoring Jacob’s Law.

Familiarity Is the Foundation

Most people don’t want to explore your product. They want to complete a task. If your design fights their expectations, they’ll either leave or struggle through it while silently blaming your team. It’s not a great outcome.

Good UX often feels invisible. It doesn’t demand attention. It quietly matches what people already know, so they can move through it without friction. Familiarity becomes a kind of shortcut.

This is why most modern apps look and behave in similar ways. Not because designers are lazy—but because repetition reduces the learning curve. The more a product blends into common habits, the faster people get comfortable.

There’s also less risk. If your navigation behaves like every other site, it’s not going to trip people up. And that’s often better than chasing something unique that ends up confusing them.

That doesn’t mean you can’t try new ideas. But those ideas need to be grounded in what people already understand. Change for the sake of change rarely helps.

Users Are Shaping the Future, Not Designers

In the early days of the web, it made sense to try different layouts and navigation ideas. Standards hadn’t formed yet. But now they have.

Big players—Google, Apple, Amazon, Instagram—set most of those standards by how their platforms behave. These products reach millions, sometimes billions, of people. Over time, those people develop habits. And they bring those habits with them.

If your app or site ignores those habits, it creates cognitive drag. People stop and think: "Why doesn’t this work the way I expect?" That moment of confusion might seem small, but it adds up. Especially when you're competing with tools that don’t cause the same hesitation.

In this way, UX design is becoming less about the designer’s vision and more about the user's prior experience. The most successful products adapt to the mental models people already have. They don't try to rewrite them.

And those mental models evolve. When mobile design patterns changed in the 2010s, users slowly adjusted. Now, everyone expects swipe gestures, pull-to-refresh, and tap targets big enough for thumbs. Designers didn’t teach users those ideas. Apple and Android did. UX followed.

So what does that mean for designers? It means that watching users is more important than chasing trends. You don’t need to predict the future. You need to pay attention to what’s already becoming normal and build around that.

Subtle Innovation Is the Way Forward

Some designers hear rules like Jacob’s Law and think it sounds limiting. But it’s not about avoiding creativity. It’s about placing it where it makes the most impact.

Instead of reinventing basic UI patterns, future UX improvements will likely focus on:

• Faster load times
• Fewer clicks to complete tasks
• Better handling of errors
• Clearer copy and labels
• Smarter defaults and auto-fill suggestions
• Less clutter

None of these things scream innovation. But they make the product easier to use, which is the whole point of good UX.

A flashy new menu interaction might impress another designer. But a clearer "Submit" button or a quicker form experience will actually help your users. That’s where the effort should go.

If you do want to introduce something new, it has to earn its place. It should either feel like a natural extension of something users already understand, or it should make their experience so much better that it’s worth the learning curve.

But those cases are rare.

That’s why the future of UX won’t be defined by wild redesigns or unusual layouts. It’ll be defined by design that stays out of the way. That’s how products will win—by feeling easy from the very first click.

Final Thought

There’s a reason most successful apps look familiar: they respect what users already know.

Jacob’s Law isn’t telling you to copy what everyone else is doing. It’s reminding you that users bring expectations with them. Fight those expectations, and you make things harder. Work with them, and you make progress easier.

In UX, standing out is rarely the goal. Making things make sense is.