jakobs-law

jakobs-law is a skill for Claude Code from Owl-Listener/designer-skills. It costs 51 tokens per session (783 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide based on Jakob's Law, the idea that people expect new products to behave like familiar products they already use.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to assess navigation, settings, shopping, and other familiar interactions before introducing a novel design.
Why use it?
It helps avoid unnecessary learning costs when deciding whether to follow or change common interface patterns.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the interaction-design plugin — 22 skills, 5 commands shipped together

not rated 2.6krepo +89 7d ago A scan Socket: passSnyk: passSkillSpector: pass 51 tokens original MIT

Good fit Use it to assess navigation, settings, shopping, and other familiar interactions before introducing a novel design.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/jakobs-law
About the project

Owl-Listener/designer-skills is a collection of AI-agent skills, commands, and plugins for design work, covering research, design systems, interfaces, interaction, and delivery. Designers and developers use it inside coding assistants to guide design tasks, and the catalogue entries represent selected parts of that larger collection.

Owl-Listener/designer-skills · 2,619 stars · on GitHub

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add Owl-Listener/designer-skills --skill jakobs-law
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Owl-Listener/designer-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install interaction-design, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 22 skills, 5 commands.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for jakobs-law

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/jakobs-law/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/jakobs-law)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/jakobs-law"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/jakobs-law/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for jakobs-law

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/jakobs-law"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/jakobs-law.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 51 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 783 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 10 Aug 2026
  • Snyk pass 10 Aug 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00051 $0.00783
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.00392
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00157
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00078

Measured 9d ago against content hash d94744d98dc9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

jakobs-law scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

interaction-design/skills/jakobs-law/SKILL.md · 68 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 68 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Jakob's Law

You are an expert in mental models, user expectations, and the role of convention in interface design.

What You Do

You apply Jakob's Law to identify which design conventions carry strong user expectations, evaluate the cost of departing from them, and make deliberate decisions about when to follow and when to innovate.

The Principle

Users spend most of their time on other products. They arrive at yours with pre-built expectations about where navigation lives, what a cart icon means, how a toggle behaves, and where to look for settings. Jakob's Law, articulated by Jakob Nielsen, states:

Users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

This is not an argument for copying competitors. It is an argument for understanding which conventions carry strong enough expectations that departing from them imposes a real learning cost — and being deliberate when you do.

Where Conventions Are Strongest

Some patterns are so universal that users rely on them unconsciously:

  • Logo top-left → home: violating this forces users to hunt for a way back
  • Shopping cart icon → checkout: recognised globally across languages and cultures
  • Hamburger menu → hidden navigation: established on mobile despite early friction
  • Search icon (magnifying glass) → search field: universal; even non-technical users recognise it
  • X to close: applies to modals, tooltips, notifications, drawers
  • Blue underlined text → link: weakening but still active in text-heavy contexts

The Cost of Departing From Convention

Every time you deviate, users must:

  1. Discover that the familiar pattern does not apply
  2. Work out the new pattern
  3. Hold both patterns in memory until the new one is learned

This cost is paid on every visit until the pattern is learned — which requires repetition and motivation. The benefit of the new approach must outweigh this cumulative cost across your entire user base.

When Deviation Is Justified

Read the full file on GitHub · 68 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 68 lines · 51 tokens per session scan A d94744d98dc9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

jakobs-law is a skill published in the GitHub repository Owl-Listener/designer-skills (2,619 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 51 tokens to every session and 783 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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