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.
Jakob Nielsen's trip report for the 1992 Computer-Human Interaction conference (CHI '92).
CHI'92 (Monterey, CA, 3-7 May 1992), IEEE Software 9, 4 (July 1992), pp. 78- 79.
The concept of direct manipulation is usually viewed as a single characteristic of a class of interaction styles. Here, direct manipulation is analyzed according to a detailed layered interaction model, showing that it has quite different effects on the dialogue on the different levels. In particular, the "no errors" claim may be true at the syntax level but not at several of the levels above or below that level.
Furthermore, a unified framework is presented for conceptualizing Direct Manipulation, What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG), Transparency, Immediate Command Specification, Arcticulatory Directness, and Computational Appliances according to a layered interaction view.
User interface standards can be hard to use for developers. In a laboratory experiment, 26 students achieved only 71% compliance with a two page standard; many violations were due to influence from previous experience with non-standard systems. In a study of a real company's standard, developers were only able to find 4 of 12 deviations in a sample system, and three real products broke between 32% and 55% of the mandatory rules in the standard. Designers were found to rely heavily on the examples in the standard and their experience with other user interfaces.
Thovtrup, H., and Nielsen, J. (1991). Assessing the usability of a user interface standard. Proc. ACM CHI'91 Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems (New Orleans, LA, 28 April-2 May), 335-341.
Trip report from the ACM Hypertext'89 conference. Includes summary of Meyrowitz' discussion of open integrating hypertext and the extent to which the Memex vision has been realized so far.
Hypertext'89 (Pittsburgh, PA, 5-8 November 1989), SIGCHI Bulletin 21, 4 (April 1990), pp. 52-61.
Jakob Nielsen's trip report for the 1989 Hypertext 2 conference in York, U.K.
International Conference on Fifth Generation Computer Systems (Tokyo, Japan, 28 November - 2 December 1988), SIGCHI Bulletin 21, 1 (July 1989), pp. 68-71.
Jakob Nielsen's trip report from the 1989 Computer-Human Interaction (CHI '89) conference held in Austin, Texas.
CHI'89 (Austin, TX, 30 April - 4 May 1989), SIGCHI Bulletin 21, 2 (October 1989), pp. 28-40.
Jakob Nielsen's trip report for the 1989 Hyper Hyper Conference in London, UK.
British Computer Society HyperHyper workshop (London, UK, 23 February 1989), SIGCHI Bulletin 21, 1 (July 1989), pp. 65-67.
A review of the Macintosh CD-ROM versions of The Manhole, the Time Table of History, and the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog with emphasis on their usability and their support of hypertext navigation. Based on the discussion of these hypertexts the following general principles are found to be useful for analyzing hypertext user interfaces: Navigational dimensions and their explicitness, directionality and literalness, landmarks, locational orientation, history lists, and backtrack mechanisms.
Originally published as: Nielsen, J. (1990). Three medium-sized hypertexts on CD-ROM. ACM SIGIR Forum 24, 1, 2-10.
