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      NN/g History

      We have been been practicing, researching, and teaching user experience for over 20 years

      • 1993
      • Don Norman coined the term “User Experience” while at Apple (the words had been used in a phrase by others, but he made it a job title).

      • Jakob Nielsen published Usability Engineering, an early defining text for user research methods and best practices, which has since been cited by over 15,000 scholarly articles.

      • 1994
      • Jakob Nielsen publishes "10 Usability Heuristics”, a usability checklist now referenced and taught around the world as the basic tenets of usability.

      • 1997
      • Jakob Nielsen advocates for Discount Usability -- a fast, inexpensive, iterative approach to user research which brought usability testing out of academia and into business best practices.

      • 1998
      • Nielsen Norman Group founded by Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman.

        Nielsen Norman Group logo
      • 1999
      • Jakob Nielsen publishes Designing Web Usability, a bestseller defining the field of web usability, now translated in 24 languages.

      • 2000
      • User Experience World Tour produced by NN/g brought thought leaders in the burgeoning field of UX to cities around the world, giving unprecedented exposure to UX design and research techniques.

      • Bruce Tognazzini, author of Tog on Interface, joins NN/g as a Principal.

      • 2001
      • The first Intranet Design Annual awards, the world's most prestigious recognition of high-quality intranet UX.

      • 2002
      • Don Norman publishes The Design of Everyday Things, which popularized the term “affordances”. This work has now been cited by over 15,000 scholarly articles. Norman also receives the SIG-CHI Lifetime Achievement Award.

      • NN/g's World Tour evolves into Usability Week, a recurring event with full-day training courses (now known as the NN/g UX Conference).

      • 2003
      • Don Norman speaks to TED about Emotional Design.

      • 2006
      • Watershed research findings about how users read online content — the famous F-shaped pattern for reading text on the web — published in Eyetracking Web Usability, by Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice

      • 2013
      • Jakob Nielsen receives the SIG-CHI Lifetime Practice Award, from the foremost academic professional association for the science of Human-Computer Interaction.

      • 2014
      • UX Certification program launched to recognize achievement of UX Conference attendees who dedicate substantive time to intensive learning.

      • 2017
      • Updated world-wide study of user experience revisits and updates web usability guidelines from 2002's watershed Designing Web Usability.

      • 2018
      • NN/g celebrates 20 years and we continue to lead the industry with research-based recommendations for facing today's user experience challenges.

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