Tiktok is not a spaceship: on the confusion over Tiktok and Jacob’s Law
Introduction
Hello everyone, nice to meet you. My name is Haruki Ishiamru, and I usually work as a UI/UX designer in Tokyo, while translating great articles from overseas into Japanese in my personal non-profit blog “体験とデザイン・スタートアップについて (About Experience, Design and Startups)”. Also, my unfamiliar English may cause you some inconvenience. If I were a native speaker, I would probably say something like “Thank you for your patience” (maybe not?).
By the way, the article “Did TikTok just make Jakob’s Law obsolete?” was published the other day and has become a bit of a hot topic in our circles.
In this article, it is stated that the widely known “Jacob’s Law” was valid in the early days of the Internet (around 2000) when it was first proposed, but eventually became “obsolete” with the advent of “all-encompassing” social networks such as TikTok and Instagram.
In other words, I think the author of this article is trying to argue that Jacob’s Law can no longer be expected to be valid because TikTok and Instagram have mutant UIs and their users do not go outside of them.
While this discussion is very stimulating and thought-provoking, however, I found it to be more or less misaligned with the point that Jacob’s Law is trying to convey. In this article, I will try my best to unpack that “misalignment” and also touch on why there is such confusion.
Reflections on “Jacob’s Law”
So let’s look at “Jacob’s Law” again. It is important to reconcile our understanding of the premise of everything we do. Let me quote the definition of this law from an article written by our master, Dr. Jakob Nielsen.
1. Jakob’s Law of the Internet User Experience
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. (See 2-minute video discussing Jakob’s Law in further depth.)
This Law is not even a future trend since it has been ruling the Web for several years. It has long been true that websites do more business the more standardized their design is. Think Yahoo and Amazon. Think “shopping cart” and the silly little icon. Think blue text links.
Reading it again, it seems to me that the rapid conversions to Tiktok and Instagram that we are talking about here are simply the “other sites” in this quote that have replaced Tiktok and Instagram.
And with that in mind, I think we can settle on the simple guideline that the model we should refer to when designing our experiences on other sites is changing to Tiktok and Instagram.
But this conclusion contains a somewhat curious premise to begin with. The question is, “Isn’t it because Jacob’s Law was already invalid that outlandish UI and UX such as Tiktok and Instagram are working?”
Let’s consider this for a moment.
How does Jacob’s Law explain the success of outlandish UI/UX?
Let’s go back again to the Nielsen article I mentioned earlier.
Now that I think about it, I feel that the overly aggressive title “The End of Web Design” is all wrong. Well, that aside, at the end of the article, there is a chapter titled “What Remains of Web Design”. Let me quote from it.
What Remains in Web Design
Even as websites become more similar and appearance design becomes more simplified, there will be a large number of design decisions that still need to be made in order to optimize the usability of each individual site.
Most important, each Internet service needs to be based on a task analysis of its specific users and their needs. You can combine standardized user interface elements in many ways, and the better sites will support the way users want to approach the problems.
For example, even if you always call search “Search” and you always have the same way of distinguishing between simple search and advanced search, the question will remain whether advanced search makes sense for any specific site.
Content design will also remain. Each product description is different. Each opinion piece is different. There will always be a need to determine the best approach to describing each unit of information.
All paragraphs are very suggestive.
The first and following paragraphs state that even if Jacob’s Law were valid, the web interface would evolve incrementally to optimize usability. Indeed, otherwise we would still be living in a Web 1.0 UI world of text and hyperlinks only.
In other words, Jacob’s Law seems to encompass a story in which a well-designed site “steals users’ time” from a site with a stale old-generation design, which eventually becomes the standard and is imitated, leading to the evolution of the entire web.
The last paragraph also lightly hints at the coming age of “content-driven experiences”, including UGC, which is a hot topic these days. Whether it is Tiktok or Instagram, it is an undeniable fact that they are successful today by maximizing the value of user-generated content, and Jacob’s Law does not deny this.
Addendum: Even Tiktok is learning from the UI of other sites.
Here again, let’s take a look at the Tiktok screen on the topic.
Even on Tiktok, not all UI is outlandish and unique to it. There is the common footer navigation, which, like Apple’s UITabBar guidelines, keeps the number of items to five or less.
We are also very familiar with the correspondence between icons and labels scattered throughout. The novel icons and labels are nowhere to be found, such as an alien icon 👽 to launch a rocket 🚀 somewhere.
The concept of a Following / For You timeline is also something we can accept without any particular resistance, and we believe it is a UI we have already learned from other services.
Conclusion
Services like Tiktok and Instagram may indeed appear to be outlandish “mutations” that do not pass the laws of the past, but upon closer inspection, they do not deviate from Jacob’s Law. Rather, they are simply taking ideas borrowed from other services and refining them by focusing on user behavior to reach their current state.
And the experiences created in this way have become overwhelmingly competitive, to the point of monopolizing users’ time. In this case, in the light of Jacob’s Law, we service designers should refer to “flowing sites” such as Tiktok and Instagram. These have simply taken that position away from the old text-based sites.
Not that it matters
I am currently looking for a full time UX designer job. I can write beautiful English (because I am a paid member of Deep L), but I am not a good speaker. Please feel free to contact me.
✉️ haruki.ishimaru(at)gmail.com
Thank you for reading to the end 🗼❣️
