Articles

Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a retired principal and co-founder (with Dr. Donald A. Norman) of the Nielsen Norman Group. Jakob established the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and invented the heuristic evaluation method.

Articles and Videos

  • Teenager’s UX: Designing for Teens

    Teens are (over)confident in their web abilities, but they perform worse than adults. Lower reading levels, impatience, and undeveloped research skills reduce teens’ task success and require simple, relatable sites.

  • Top 10 Application-Design Mistakes

    Application usability is enhanced when the UI guides and supports users through the workflow.

  • The Immutable Rules of UX (Jakob Nielsen Keynote)

    Jakob Nielsen's keynote at the Las Vegas UX Conference discussed the foundational principles of user experience that are stable decade after decade.

  • Children’s UX: Usability Issues in Designing for Young People

    New research with users aged 3–12 shows that children have gained substantial proficiency in using websites and apps since our last studies, though many designs are still not optimized for younger users. Designing for children requires distinct usability approaches, including targeting content narrowly for children of different ages.

  • Will People Be More Tech Savvy in 10 Years? (Jakob Nielsen)

    People naturally avoid studying computers. Don't expect people's technical skills to improve in the future.

  • Usability Testing with 5 Users: Information Foraging (video 3 of 3)

    Usability testing is similar to how wild animals hunt for food: we're trying to hunt down the design flaws in the user interface and must optimize a series of studies for total gain, rather than spend too much on any one study.

  • Usability Testing with 5 Users: ROI Criteria (video 2 of 3)

    The number of test participants for qualitative usability testing that optimizes return-on-investment is determined by 2 parameters: the facilitator's observational skills and the design team's speed when generating the next design iteration.

  • Usability Testing with 5 Users: Design Process (video 1 of 3)

    Formative usability testing is best done with a small number of study participants, so that you have time and budget to test more design iterations of the user interface.

  • Usability in the Physical World vs. on the Web

    In the real world, you can get away with causing customers a small amount of difficulty, but on a website, visitors will leave at the smallest obstacle.

  • Nielsen Norman Group: 20 Years

    Founded in 1998 when the UX field was 2% of its current size, NN/g has incessantly pushed the growth of UX and advocated for products and websites designed for real user behavior. Links to our top-hits UX articles & videos across 20 years.