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

  • Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign

    Users hate change, so it's usually best to stay with a familiar design and evolve it gradually. In the long run, however, incrementalism eventually destroys cohesiveness, calling for a new UI architecture.

  • Discount Usability: 20 Years

    Simple user testing with 5 participants, paper prototyping, and heuristic evaluation offer a cheap, fast, and early focus on usability, as well as many rounds of iterative design.

  • Social Media Outsourcing Can Be Risky

    Hosting a company's content and services on 3rd-party social networking sites involves both tactical risks (lower usability) and strategic risks (less user loyalty).

  • Twitter Postings: Iterative Design

    A timeline message was made more punchy, credible, and viral through 5 rounds of redesign. (Text as UI.)

  • Customization of UIs and Products

    Websites that let users customize the UI have the same measured usability as regular sites. Sites for customizing products, however, score substantially worse due to complex workflow.

  • Mobile Usability, First Findings

    In user testing, website use on mobile devices got very low scores, especially when users accessed 'full' sites that weren't designed for mobile.

  • Building Respect for Usability Expertise

    Enemies of usability claim that because 'the experts disagree,' they can safely ignore user advocates' expertise and run with whatever design they personally prefer.

  • Stop Password Masking

    Usability suffers when users type in passwords and the only feedback they get is a row of bullets. Typically, masking passwords doesn't even increase security, but it does cost you business due to login failures.

  • Guesses vs. Data as Basis for Design Recommendations

    Even the tiniest amount of empirical facts (say, observing 2 users) vastly improves the probability of making correct UI design decisions.

  • Investor Relations (IR) on Corporate Websites

    Individual investors are intimidated by overly complex IR sites and need simple summaries of financial data. Both individual and professional investors want the company's own story and investment vision.