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

  • Usability: Empiricism or Ideology?

    Usability's job is to research user behavior and find out what works. Usability should also defend users' rights and fight for simplicity. Both aspects have their place, and it's important to recognize the difference.

  • Archiving Usability Reports

    Most usability practitioners don't derive full value from their user tests because they don't systematically archive the reports. An intranet-based usability archive offers four substantial benefits.

  • Alertbox: 10 Years

    300,000 words of usability essays have had an impact: online user interfaces are considerably easier to use now than they were in 1995. Many predictions and recommendations have come true, though the full Alertbox vision is far from realized.

  • The Canonical Intranet Homepage

    Intranet homepages have become very similar in their basic layout. Intranets that look the same can nonetheless differ drastically in usability due to different features and content.

  • Mental Models For Search Are Getting Firmer

    Users now have precise expectations for the behavior of search. Designs that invoke this mental model but work differently are confusing.

  • Formal Usability Reports vs. Quick Findings

    Formal reports are the most common way of documenting usability studies, but informal reports are faster to produce and are often a better choice.

  • Medical Usability: How to Kill Patients Through Bad Design

    A field study identified 22 ways that automated hospital systems can result in the wrong medication being dispensed to patients. Most of these flaws are classic usability problems that have been understood for decades.

  • Evangelizing Usability: Change Your Strategy at the Halfway Point

    The evangelism strategies that help a usability group get established in a company are different from the ones needed to create a full-fledged usability culture.

  • Lower-Literacy Users: Writing for a Broad Consumer Audience

    Lower-literacy users exhibit very different reading behaviors than higher-literacy users: they plow text rather than scan it, and they miss page elements due to a narrower field of view.

  • Authentic Behavior in User Testing

    Despite being an artificial situation, user testing generates realistic findings because people engage strongly with the tasks and suspend their disbelief.