JAKOB NIELSEN (USABILITY CONSULTANT)

'Jakob Nielsen' (born 1957 in Copenhagen, Denmark) is a writer, speaker, and consultant on software and web-design usability. He earned a Ph.D. in user interface design and computer science from the Technical University of Denmark. Nielsen worked at Bellcore, IBM, and as a senior researcher at computer company Sun Microsystems. Early in the growth of the Web, Nielsen predicted that hypertext was the future of user interface design and wrote a comprehensive book about it: ''Hypertext and Hypermedia'', published in 1990. ''Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond'', an updated version of the textbook, was published in 1995 to take into account the success of the Web.
Nielsen gave his name to 'Nielsen's Law', in which he stated that network connection speeds for high-end home users would increase 50%/year, or double every 21 months.^[1] As a corollary, he noted that as this growth rate is slower than the Moore's Law growth in processor power, user experience would remain bandwidth bound.
Nielsen continues to write a newsletter on web design matters and has published several books on the subject of web design. After his regular articles on his Web site about usability research attracted media attention, he subsequently co-founded usability consulting company Nielsen Norman Group with fellow usability expert Donald Norman.
Nielsen is a leading web usability pundit, with an expertise based on human factors engineering, but he has earned the ire of graphic designers (such as those at A List Apart) for failing to balance the importance of other user experience considerations such as eye appeal. He emphasizes issues such as converting visitors to customers at e-commerce sites and creating interfaces accessible to the disabled and other underserved populations, criticizing dependence on animation, Flash and large graphics. The simple design of his own website, useit.com, indicates his personal aesthetic.
Nielsen's teachings have gained popularity with the wider design community, while at the same time Nielsen draws much criticism due to his often vague and emphatic remarks about usability and design issues, making him a controversial guru of Web design.

Contents

Publications

See also

References

External links

Publications

His published books include:

★ ''Hypertext and Hypermedia (1990)'' (ISBN 0-12-518410-7)

★ ''Usability Engineering (1994)'' (ISBN 0-12-518406-9)

★ ''Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity (1999)'' (ISBN 1-56205-810-X)

★ ''Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed (2001)'' (ISBN 0-7357-1102-X)

★ ''Prioritizing Web Usability (2006)'' (ISBN 0-321-35031-6)
Nielsen publishes a biweekly column, ''Alertbox'' , on current issues in usability. A list of Jakob Nielsen's research publications is maintained at Interaction-Design.org

See also

★ Web design

★ Website architecture

★ Usability

★ Web usability

★ Human-computer interaction

References

1. Nielsen's Law

External links

★ useit.com — Nielsen's website

★ The Backlash against Jakob Nielsen and What it Teaches Us

★ List of articles by Jakob Nielsen

★ Jakob Nielsen Interview