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Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a User Advocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group which he co-founded with Dr. Donald A. Norman (former VP of research at Apple Computer). Dr. Nielsen established the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. He holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.

Articles and Videos

  • How to Grow a UX Career and Advance Your User-Experience Expertise

    At the Virtual UX Conference, Jakob Nielsen answered audience questions on how to advance through various career stages: before getting your first job, and being successful as you grow your user experience skills and expertise.

  • Biggest Wins and Fails in 25 Years of UX Columns

    From 1995 to 2001 Jakob Nielsen wrote 250 articles with early usability insights that are still true but also contained predictions for aspirational changes that didn’t happen.

  • Firm Rules and Goals for UX vs. Balancing Goals

    To what extent do we have unwavering goals and definitive answers for user experience work? When can (or should) we compromise the design?

  • What Makes a Virtual Conference Work?

    Most online events are boring and people tune out, and yet the Virtual UX Conference was a success with strong audience engagement and high feedback scores. Why?

  • Virtual UX Conference Q&A With Jakob Nielsen

    At the first Virtual UX Conference, Jakob Nielsen answered participant questions about topics ranging from user-experience careers and skill development to foldable smartphones and the future of user interfaces.

  • Can UX be 100% Remote?

    Is it possible to do all user-experience work 100% remotely? At the first Virtual UX Conference, Jakob Nielsen answered this question in an audience Q&A session.

  • What Can UX do to Help With Covid-19?

    At the very first Virtual UX Conference, Jakob Nielsen answered a participant question about what user experience can do to help with the coronavirus crisis.

  • Slow UI: Pace Interaction to Increase Understanding

    Overly fast interfaces are error prone and encourage users to rush through websites and other systems. Design to reduce interaction speed and increase users’ understanding and task success.

  • Dualities of User Experience (Jakob Nielsen keynote)

    Many issues in the user-experience field don’t have a simple answer. Rather there’s a tension between two good answers that are often polar opposites. Both extremes can be useful perspectives, and both have their advocates when people debate UX. How do we resolve these differences? This was Jakob Nielsen's keynote at the UX Conference in Las Vegas.

  • Don't Listen to the Customers

    The first rule of user experience design is: don't base the product on what customers *say* they want. You must watch what people actually *do* when using your design.