Summary: It's hard work to make a user interface that's easy to use. The end result may seem obvious to an outsider, but ease-of-use comes from trying out many design ideas and rejecting ones that are too difficult while polishing those that make the UI better.
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.
