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.
The only realistic design strategy is to cater to the actual people who use your product, instead of designing for an idealized super-user who knows more and is more motivated than the real audience.
In a startup company, the UX team can make two main contributions: identifying the customer problem to solve and polishing the UI so that people will use this solution.
UX design must make all elements of the interaction understandable and explicit. Mystifying things to entice more clicks from users will only result in dissatisfied customers.
Metaverse projects must follow the standard user-centered design process, including prototyping and usability testing, to result in useful designs that people will want to use.
It's hard work to make a user interface that's easy to use. The end result may seem obvious to an outsider, but ease-of-use comes from trying out many design ideas and rejecting ones that are too difficult while polishing those that make the UI better.
User experience is not really about computers or technology. It's about the users (people) and about the design teams and proper processes for their members (people) to produce good UX.
Key arguments why companies should have systematic user-experience processes. Plus a discussion of the main arguments against UX. (Jakob Nielsen's UX Conference keynote.)
Data about what users do is valuable, but not nearly as valuable as information about why people did something. Such "why" insight should drive UX design decisions.
