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

  • Deferred Hypertext: The Virtues of Delayed Gratification

    Navigating a full browsing session to find information can be unpleasant and slow, particularly on mobile devices. Instead, issue a deferred request and have the information arrive later, as done by some SMS systems.

  • Mobile Devices Will Soon Be Useful

    New mobile devices and services are more realistic and useful than last year's models, and will likely expand mobile device adoption. Design usability and simplicity are key, particularly for the automotive market where complexity can be dangerous. DEMOmobile Conference on Mobile Computing 2001.

  • Designing Web Ads Using Click-Through Data

    Search engine ads are one type of Web advertising that can actually work. To create the best ads, do quick experiments and redesign ads based on usability principles for online writing. Doing so helped us increase ad click-through by 55% to 310%.

  • Is Poor Usability Killing E-Commerce?

    User success rates on e-commerce sites are only 56%, and most sites comply with only a third of documented usability guidelines. Given this, improving a site's usability can substantially increase both sales and a site's odds of survival.

  • First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users

    For good UX, pay attention to what users do, not what they say. Self-reported claims are unreliable, as are user speculations about future behavior.

  • Tagline Blues: What's the Site About?

    A website's tagline must explain what the company does and what makes it unique among competitors. Two questions can help you assess your own tagline: Would it work just as well for competitors? Would any company ever claim the opposite?

  • Helping Users Find Physical Locations

    When we asked users to find a nearby store, office, dealership, or other outlet based on information provided at a parent company's website, users succeeded only 63% of the time. On average, the 10 sites we studied complied with less than half of our 21 usability guidelines for locator design.

  • Avoid PDF for On-Screen Reading (Original Article)

    Forcing users to browse PDF files makes usability approximately 300% worse compared to HTML pages. Only use PDF for documents that users are likely to print. In those cases, following six basic guidelines will minimize usability problems.

  • Salary Survey: User Experience Professionals Earned Good Money in 2001

    A survey of 1,078 user experience professionals finds that usability specialists make more money than designers and writers in the same field. In all three areas, salaries are highest in the U.S., lower in Canada and Asia, and much lower in Europe and Australia.

  • Search: Visible and Simple

    Search is the user's lifeline for mastering complex websites. The best designs offer a simple search box on the homepage and play down advanced search and scoping.