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

  • Heuristic Evaluation of User Interfaces

    Jakob Nielsen explains the heuristic evaluation method, which allows you to judge a user interface design based on 10 well-proven general principles for human-computer interaction.

  • Discount Usability 30 Years

    For 30 years, the recommendations have remained the same for improving usability in a UX design project on a tight budget: simplified user testing with 5 users, early test of paper prototypes, and heuristic evaluation.

  • UX Intern: Looking Back 3 Years After the Internship

    Yunnuo "Yuno" Cheng (程云诺) interned with Nielsen Norman Group 3 years ago. Jakob Nielsen caught up with her to ask how the internship experience relates to her current job and what advice she has for current students on what to look for in a UX internship.

  • Users Hate Change

    Any time you release a new user interface design, you'll get complaints. This doesn't mean that the new design is worse than the old design; it simply means that it's new, and users don't like to learn different ways of doing things. Tips for reducing change aversion (you can't avoid it completely).

  • Shifting an Engineering Driven Company to Be User Centered

    Jakob Nielsen answers the question of how one can transform an organization from being focused on engineering to being focused on customers' needs.

  • "About Us" Information on Websites

    Users expect About Us sections to be clear, authentic, and transparent. They compare corporate content with third-party reviews to form a holistic opinion of a company before initiating business or applying for jobs.

  • How Today's UX Designs May Be Perceived in the Future

    Jakob Nielsen answers the question of how people in the future will judge the quality of today's user experience.

  • Too Much UX Success

    What to do when a UX team becomes too popular and too many projects want UX help with their designs, overwhelming the available capacity to do good work.

  • Is Aggressive Marketing Influencing the UX of AI Agents?

    Jakob Nielsen answers the question of how users' perception of artificial intelligence products and their user experience may be impacted by the way these services are promoted by vendors.

  • Eartracking: A New UX-Research Method

    Human ears exhibit micromovements that can be analyzed to identify design elements that surprise or startle users in a usability study. Eartracking has some advantages over eyetracking.