LEADERSHIP IN THEORY

Design Principles in Leadership: Jakob’s Law

Leaders can use Design Principles to design their Leadership Styles

Andy Chan
The Human Business
Published in
5 min readNov 3, 2019

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Photo by Alex wong on Unsplash

While most ‘laws’ have historic roots, Jakob’s Law originated from the heart of Nielsen Normal Group (NNG). Co-founded with the former VP of research, NNG operated as a consulting firm. They studied users, trying to understand how operating systems can design themselves better.

Jakob Nielsen was not just a usability expert. With references from news websites like the “web’s usability czar” and “the usability Pope”, it was easy to see why he was influential. With his influence, he popularised Jakob’s law.

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

Jakob’s Law states: “Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”

It essentially talks about design patterns. These are patterns we see across different applications and websites. For instance, Google and Yahoo! have its…

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Andy Chan
The Human Business

Product design @ Delivery Hero. I write about pretty much anything I want to write. Posting every Friday.