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

  • Web Research: Believe the Data

    Much is known about Web user behavior, yet research findings are often ignored in actual projects. Examples: up-front customer registration doesn't work; frequency of use and effectiveness of Web marketing methods are negatively correlated.

  • Content Integration

    Web services often collect content from separate sources and present it to users in a single interface. Making such integration usable requires unified meta-content.

  • Disabled Accessibility: The Pragmatic Approach

    New official standards make it easy to get the top priorities right and make websites accessible for users with disabilities (e.g., blind users who can't see images). But the single-design approach may be nearing the end of its life.

  • The Top 10 Web Design Mistakes of 1999

    New technology and conventions have led to several new classes of usability problems in Web design.

  • Who Commits The "Top Ten Mistakes" of Web Design?

    Major websites violate on average 16% of the top ten mistakes in Web design; huge corporate sites have many more design mistakes than the most popular sites.

  • "Top Ten Mistakes" Revisited Three Years Later

    9 of 10 mistakes in Web design identified in May 1996 continued to cause severe usability problems years later and should be avoided in modern websites.

  • Stuck With Old Browsers for at Least 3 Years

    4% of users upgraded to a new version each month in 1998. By 2008, upgrade speeds were only 2%/month. It takes 3 years for 3/4 of users to embrace a new version.

  • Intranet Portals: The Corporate Information Infrastructure

    An intranet should have a single home page that integrates a directory hierarchy, search, and news. Most intranets are chaotic, under-funded, and lack design standards, causing huge losses in employee productivity.

  • URL as UI

    Users continue to type and guess URLs and domain names, so Web usability can be improved by better URLs. In the long term this machine-level addressing scheme must be hidden.

  • Trust or Bust: Communicating Trustworthiness in Web Design

    The Web is turning into a low-trust society, hurting the honest sites. Site design can communicate trustworthiness in several ways, though ultimately the customer's actual experience is what matters.