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

  • Top 10 Information Architecture (IA) Mistakes

    Structure and navigation must support each other and integrate with search and across subsites. Complexity, inconsistency, hidden options, and clumsy UI mechanics prevent users from finding what they need.

  • World's Best Headlines: BBC News

    Precise communication in a handful of words? The editors at BBC News achieve it every day, offering remarkable headline usability.

  • IA Task Failures Remain Costly

    Task success is up substantially compared with usability statistics from 2004. Bad information architecture causes most of the remaining user failures.

  • First 2 Words: A Signal for the Scanning Eye

    Testing how well people understand a link's first 11 characters shows whether sites write for users, who typically scan rather than read lists of items.

  • Donation Usability: Increasing Online Giving to Non-Profits and Charities

    User research finds significant deficiencies in non-profit organizations' website content, which often fails to provide the info people need to make donation decisions.

  • Kindle Content Design

    Writing for Kindle is like writing for print, the Web, and mobile devices combined; optimal usability means optimizing content for each platform's special characteristics.

  • Kindle 2 Usability Review

    Amazon's new e-book reader offers print-level readability and shines for reading fiction, but it has awkward interaction design and poor support for non-linear content.

  • Write for Reuse

    Users often see online content out of context and read it with different goals than you envisioned. While you can't predict all such goals, you can plan for multiple uses of your text.

  • Mobile Web 2009 = Desktop Web 1998

    Mobile phone users struggle mightily to use websites, even on high-end devices. To solve the problems, websites should provide special mobile versions.

  • Macintosh: 25 Years

    Although its individual features weren't new, the Mac offered integration, the expectation of a GUI, and interface consistency. Is the iPhone the Mac of mobile?