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.
6% of task attempts are extremely slow and constitute outliers in measured user performance. These sad incidents are caused by bad luck that designers can - and should - eradicate.
When working on business problems, users flitter among sites, alternating visits to different service genres. No single website defines the user experience on its own.
Search engines extract too much of the Web's value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors.
The Internet is growing at an annualized rate of 18% and now has one billion users. A second billion users will follow in the next ten years, bringing a dramatic change in worldwide usability needs.
Eyetracking data show that users are easily distracted when watching video on websites, especially when the video shows a talking head and is optimized for broadcast rather than online viewing.
A strict focus on accessibility as a scorecard item doesn't help users with disabilities. To help these users accomplish critical tasks, you must adopt a usability perspective.
Usability goes beyond the level of individual users interacting with screens. It's also a question of how easy or cumbersome it is for the entire organization to use a system.
An analysis of intranet portals found slimmer information architectures and a renewed emphasis on fresh content and useful applications. Past findings, including those on role-based personalization, were confirmed.
