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

  • User Satisfaction vs. Performance Metrics

    Users generally prefer designs that are fast and easy to use, but satisfaction isn't 100% correlated with objective usability metrics.

  • Homepage Design Changes

    Web design is stabilizing; the average homepage is only about 40% different than it was a year before, corresponding to 3 years between complete redesigns.

  • Traveling Usability Lab

    User testing can be done anywhere; witness our international studies, carried out with equipment that fit in a carry-on bag.

  • Tunnel Vision and Selective Attention

    Users don't see stuff that's right on the screen. Selective attention makes people overlook things outside their focus of interest.

  • SEO and Usability

    What makes a website good will also give it a high SERP rank, but overly tricky search engine optimization can undermine the user experience.

  • The Most Important Usability Activity

    What's worth the most: field studies or user tests? Depends on your company's usability maturity, but user testing is the safe bet if you can do only one thing.

  • Serif vs. Sans-Serif Fonts for HD Screens

    Decent computer screens with pixel densities of 220 PPI or more lead to new usability guidelines for on-screen typography.

  • Why Country Sites Are So Bad

    When a multinational company produces a localized country site, usability is often lost. Local advertising agencies design good-looking sites that don't communicate.

  • How Many Test Users in a Usability Study?

    The answer is 5, except when it's not. Most arguments for using more test participants are wrong, but some tests should be bigger and some smaller.

  • Repurposing vs. Optimized Design

    It's cheap but degrading to reuse content and design across diverging media forms like print vs. online or desktop vs. mobile. Superior UX requires tight platform integration.