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.
User testing on 3 continents confirmed that the main usability guidelines hold worldwide, but many other considerations exist to better support international users.
Once users reject a design technique due to repeated bad experiences it's almost impossible to use it for good because people will avoid it every time.
