Why every website on the internet looks the same
You might have noticed that most websites you visit on the internet look pretty much alike. If you take the hero section, for example, it has a big-ass heading at the top, a small subheading, a call-to-action below that, and all of that accompanied by a cute little illustration on the side. This is done deliberately, and here’s the reason.
One of the most important aspects of digital product design is familiarity. It’s crucial that whenever a user is introduced to a new product, the interface is familiar to them and something that they can understand with little to no learning curve.
As humans, we like to feel comfortable. We always try to avoid things that are beyond our comfort zone. This is the same with digital products. Users will always prefer a product that they feel comfortable with.
Users spend most of their time on other sites
If you’re familiar with the laws of UX, you might have heard of this phrase. It derives from the popular Jacob’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.”
Jacob’s Law is a classic way of explaining the importance of familiarity in design.
Users build mental models of products as they go along using them. When they come across a similar product, they have expectations that the new product will act and behave somewhat the same.
If the new product has a very small learning curve, the user can focus on completing their task rather than learning the usability of the product. This empowers the user.
Let’s talk a bit more about mental models
As the guys at Nielsen Norman Group say, A mental model is something the user knows (or think they know) about a system, in this case, a website.
This means their actions on websites they visit in the future will be based on what their mental models predict.
As internet users, we all have our own versions of mental models. But the basics of all these models are the same.
For example, if we want to navigate through a website’s pages, we look for them in the horizontal navigation bar at the top. If we want to go back to the homepage, we click the logo. And if we want to buy something, we know how to add it to the cart and checkout.
But websites don’t give us a tutorial or a walkthrough every time we visit one. That’s because designers and developers know that humans are smart enough to predict a website’s interface without having to learn it every time.
Just like users, designers create mental models of products they use. This is can be an issue when creating new products.
As tech people, we have seen more websites, more user experiences. The basic ones as well as the state-of-the-art and innovative ones. But this is rarely the case when it comes to our clients and their users.
Therefore designers might think an experience they create is perfect for users and very intuitive whereas, in reality, it can be the complete opposite.
When you see people make mistakes on your site, the reason is often because they’ve formed an erroneous mental model
Familiar metaphors
Another example of familiarity in design is Apple’s skeuomorphic design language and its use of real-life metaphors to guide the user in the interface.
Most applications in Apple’s earlier operating systems mimicked real-world products.
The buttons looked like actual clickable buttons. The compass app looked exactly like a compass. Even files and folders behaved very similarly to how they would in the real world.
This familiarity helped users to get accustomed to the digital versions of their real-life counterparts. The users already had a mental model of how these objects worked in real life and were able to apply their knowledge to operate the digital versions of them.
When virtual objects and actions in an application are metaphors for objects and actions in the real world, users quickly grasp how to use the app.
Steal like an artist
No creative work is 100% original. And in most cases, it doesn’t have to be. Any new project builds on things that came before it.
Austin Kleon explains the importance of stealing ideas from better designers when doing creative work in his best-selling book Steal Like an Artist.
It’s important that designers understand that they shouldn’t create novel designs for every new project they work on. It is scientifically proven that familiarity is important. And building upon things other design experts have already worked on can always make your product better.
More often than not, those designers have done a ton of research themselves when creating their products.
Knowing the art of stealing like an artist without plagiarising is a talent that great designers should all possess.
It's important to have a unique identity for every website you create. But it's equally important to make sure that you don’t do that by sacrificing a very important aspect of designing for the web — familiarity.
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