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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

  • Top 10 Web-Design Mistakes of 2021

    Jakob Nielsen condemns 10 awful design flaws that plague today's websites, as voted by the audience at his Virtual UX Conference keynote.

  • Enterprise User Experience

    Trends for improving the user experience for enterprise software and other internal design projects.

  • Limited Usability Testing and Business Decisions

    Some business stakeholders say that 5 test users can't represent all customers, and so it's too dangerous to release a new design. Better to keep existing workflows unchanged. How to respond to such claims.

  • Video Game Design and User Experience

    Video game design is a special case of user interface design, with some differences (especially in user goals) but also many similarities with more traditional UX design problems and methods.

  • Should Experienced Designers Go Back to College?

    If experienced designers want to learn about psychology and how it applies to user experience, should they get a psychology degree, or is it better to learn on your own?

  • The Role of Design Ethics in UX

    The push for less-ethical or even deceptive user interfaces is often caused by short-term thinking and immediate UX metrics. The long-term impact of harming users can backfire and lead to reduced brand loyalty.

  • User Feedback vs. Innovation

    Relying too much on feedback from customers risks hampering innovation, so what is the best balance for UX design?

  • Low-Code Platforms and User Experience

    Low-code platforms and other end-user programming or simplified implementation don't remove the need for task analysis and other deeper UX work and thus don't guarantee great usability. But they can free up budget for better UX work.

  • Handling Insignificance in UX Data

    After collecting KPI numbers for two versions of a design, the difference between the two metrics is not statistically significant. Now which version should you launch?

  • How Useful Is the System Usability Scale (SUS) in UX Projects?

    SUS is a 35-years old and thus well-established way to measure user satisfaction, but it is not the most recommended way of doing so in user research.