Jakob’s Law: why every big app puts its menu at the bottom

Have you ever wondered why the big apps, Revolut, Airbnb or Uber, all put their menu in the same place: at the bottom of the screen?

Neither a lack of ideas, nor copy and paste

The easy answer would be that designers lack creativity and just copy each other. That is not it.

A principle: Jakob’s Law

This resemblance actually follows a principle of UX design.

Its official rule, stated by Jakob Nielsen, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, fits in one sentence: “Users spend most of their time on other sites.”

Your app, a thin slice of their time

The idea is simple: your users spend almost all of their time in other apps. Yours takes up only a thin slice of it.

The mental model

So when they open your app, they expect it to work like the ones they already know. That expectation has a name: the mental model.

Changing the rule to look creative

If you move the bottom navigation, or reshuffle the information architecture just to look different, the user gets lost.

And a lost user does not search for long: they delete your app.

Don’t reinvent the wheel

In short: in UX design, don’t try to reinvent the wheel.

Start from the standards

Work with the standards that exist, and put components where people are used to finding them: that is what makes the experience easy.