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

  • Mobile Phones: Europe's Next Minitel?

    Europe's cellular phone system is far superior to that in the United States. However, telephones will not be the platform for the mobile Internet. Given this, Europe's advantage may in fact be an obstacle to real innovations, as France's experience with Minitel shows.

  • The Web in 2001: Paying Customers

    Offering free services on websites is not a sustainable business model, nor is advertising, which doesn't work on the Web. Most Internet companies are now pursuing an enterprise strategy to make money, but they'll soon begin turning to individual customers for revenue as well.

  • WAP Mobile Phones Field Study Findings

    Following a UK field study, 70% of users decided not to continue using WAP mobile phones. Mobile's killer app is killing time; m-commerce's prospects are dim for the next several years. Current services are poorly designed, have insufficient task analysis, and abuse existing non-mobile design guidelines.

  • Security & Human Factors

    A big lie of computer security is that security improves as password complexity increases. In reality, users simply write down difficult passwords, leaving the system vulnerable. Security is better increased by designing for how people actually behave.

  • Flash: 99% Bad

    Flash reduces usability for three reasons: it makes bad design more likely, it breaks the Web's fundamental interaction style, and it consumes resources that would be better spent enhancing a site's core value.

  • Request Marketing

    The Web must reverse the traditional direction of marketing, and although once a viable paradigm permission marketing is no longer sufficient. Instead of a company generating messages when it wants to reach its customers, with request marketing, the company sends only messages that users ask for. Request marketing is especially suited to the mobile Internet, where intrusive messages are ultra aggravating.

  • Content Creation by Average People

    To take the Internet to the next level, users must begin posting their own material rather than simply consuming content or distributing copyrighted material. Unfortunately most people are poor writers and even worse at authoring other media. Solutions include structured creation, selection-based media, and teaching content creation in schools.

  • New Devices Augur Decent Mobile User Experience

    The current generation of mobile Internet products and services has miserable usability (as shown at the DEMOmobile 2000 conference). New devices like Blackberry, Modo, and a prototype Microsoft telephone do better.

  • Regulatory Usability

    Regulatory agencies should not transfer their rules from the print world unchanged to Web content that is being read in a different manner. Instead, regulations should concern the usability of the actual information and whether users understand it.

  • Mailing List Usability

    Mailing list content must be ultra-short. Provide separate email addresses for subscribing and unsubscribing and include info on how to get off in every mailing list message. Improved usability increased subscriptions by 128% in one case study.