Jakob Nielsen (born 1957 in Copenhagen, Denmark) is a leading web usability consultant. He holds a Ph.D. in human-computer interaction from the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen.

Biography

Background and early career

Dr. Nielsen's earlier affiliations include Bellcore (Bell Communications Research), the Technical University of Denmark, and the IBM User Interface Institute at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

Sun Microsystems

From 1994 to 1998 he was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer. He was hired to make heavy-duty enterprise software easier to use, since large-scale applications had been the focus of most of his projects at the phone company and IBM. But luckily the job definition of a Distinguished Engineer is "you're supposed to be the world's leading expert in your field, so you figure out what would be most important for the company for you to work on." Therefore, Dr. Nielsen ended up spending most of his time at Sun on defining the emerging field of Web usability. He was usability lead for several design rounds of Sun's website and intranet (SunWeb), including the original SunWeb design in 1994.

Current activities

Nielsen is on the editorial board of Morgan Kaufmann Publishers' book series in Interactive Technologies; contact him if you are planning an advanced book on user interfaces.

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.

Contributions

Nielsen founded 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.

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. 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 has also given his 5 quality components of Usability Goals, which are:

Learnability, Efficiency, Memorability, Error, Satisfaction.

Controversy

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, designates 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.

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) (coauthor: Marie Tahir)

Prioritizing Web Usability (2006) (ISBN 0-321-35031-6) (coauthor: Hoa Loranger)

Nielsen publishes a biweekly column, Alertbox ISSN 1548-5552, on current issues in usability. A list of Jakob Nielsen's research publications is maintained at Interaction-Design.org