Improving Product Configurator UX with Familiarity

Improving Product Configurator UX with Familiarity

By Paul Gimbel

Paul Gimbel
DriveWorks Sherpa

Paul is an enthusiast for innovation and automation. With industry experience and years of accumulated technical knowledge and insight, Paul is a highly experienced DriveWorks implementor. Since joining the DriveWorks team in 2022 as DriveWorks Sherpa, Paul has shared his in-depth product knowledge through articles, blogs, events, and in the DriveWorks forum.

Can You Be Arrested for Ignoring 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.

While there are a lot of regulations surrounding the use of the Internet today, Jakob’s Law of Internet User Experience is more akin to a law of physics. It’s more a guideline and a principle than a law that could land you in trouble with your local authorities. But Jakob’s Law is very important to anyone that is designing interfaces, like we do in DriveWorks.

Coined by Jakob Nielsen, User Advocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group who are world leaders in research-based user experience. Jakob’s Law of Internet User Experience states that “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.”

The implications are critical to how we design our DriveWorks configurators. We need to realize that our users will come to our projects with mental baggage, preconceived notions about how our configurator should work. And if we’ve tried to be clever or tried out something that’s new and exciting, we might be just delaying our users and frustrating them as they try to figure out our “masterpiece”.

Instead of focusing on how to use our site, we want our users focusing on the product that they are configuring. We want our configurators to be a quick and easy way for our users to get our products customized for their applications. When we leverage familiar mental models (like online shopping), we allow the user to think less about how to use our configurator and more about the product that they are ordering from us.

Even if our users are internal to our organization, those sales or estimating or engineering people need to focus on ensuring that they are accurately representing the product being designed, rather than concerning themselves with the workflow of the configurator.

Read more about Jakob’s Law here.

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