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.
Across 50 teams, the average time needed for their first usability test of a website was 39 hours. The average site had 11 usability catastrophes that prevented users from completing their tasks.
Global use of websites leads to international usability problems and coping with the levels of Internet maturity in different countries; many of which are gaining rapidly
Users demand compliance with established design conventions. No site can stand out any more; all are part of a single interwoven user experience; the Web as a whole dictates design
Instead of emulating the real world, websites should build on the strengths of the medium and go beyond what's possible in physical reality: be non-linear, customize service, ignore geography.
Website usage must be tracked to plan server capacity needs and future business models. Examples show use of regression statistics to predict future traffic patterns.
Reputation management is an alternative to branding: people can find useful content on the Web by relying on computationally processed quality ratings from other users.
