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

  • Characteristics of Usability Problems Found by Heuristic Evaluation

    Heuristic evaluation is a good method of identifying both major and minor problems with an interface, but the lists of usability problems found by heuristic evaluation will tend to be dominated by minor problems, which is one reason severity ratings form a useful supplement to the method.

  • Navigating Large Information Spaces

    This chapter from Jakob Nielsen's 1995 book Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond explores a variety of mechanisms for helping users navigate in digital environments including history lists, bookmarks, overview diagrams, and navigational dimensions and metaphors.

  • Why No Graphics?

    Useit.com, Jakob Nielsen's site from 1995-2012, had almost no graphics because fast download times are the number one criterion for Web usability.

  • Architectural Component of Hypertext Systems

    Hypertext systems include a Presentation level, a Hypertext Abstract Machine (HAM) level, and a Database level. The following sections describe each of the levels in further detail, starting at the bottom. (Chapter 5 from Jakob Nielsen's book, Multimedia and Hypertext.)

  • Annual Themes of the CHI Conferences

    Jakob Nielsen's trip report overview of the Computer Human Interaction (CHI) Conferences from 1983 to 1994.

  • Report From a 1994 Web Usability Study

    Summary of usability results conducted in 1994 on the web sites of Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and Time Warner; the report includes screen captures of several famous early websites and because it is one of the first formal usability studies of the Web.

  • Severity Ratings for Usability Problems

    Rating usability problems according to their severity facilitates the allocation of resources to fix the most serious problems. Severity ratings are a combination of frequency, impact, and persistence.

  • Summary of Usability Inspection Methods

    Usability inspection is the generic name for a set of methods that are all based on having evaluators inspect a user interface. Typically, usability inspection is aimed at finding usability problems in the design, though some methods also address issues like the severity of the usability problems and the overall usability of an entire system.

  • CHI'94 Trip Report

    Jakob Nielsen's trip report for the 1994 Computer-Human Interaction conference (CHI '94). CHI'94 (Boston, MA, April 24-28), IEEE Software 11, 4 (July), 110-112.

  • My Foreword to Mullet and Sano's Book on Visual Design

    Jakob Nielsen's foreword to Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques, by Darrell Sano and Kevin Mullet.