About Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen has been called:

• "the king of usability" (Internet Magazine)
• "the guru of Web page usability" (The New York Times)
• "the next best thing to a true time machine" (USA Today)
• "the smartest person on the Web" (ZDNet AnchorDesk)
• "the world's leading expert on Web usability" (U.S. News & World Report)
• one of the top 10 minds in small business (FORTUNE Small Business)
• "the world's leading expert on user-friendly design" (Stuttgarter Zeitung, Germany)
• "knows more about what makes Web sites work than anyone else on the planet" (Chicago Tribune, March 6, 2000)
• "one of the world's foremost experts in Web usability" (Business Week)
• "the Web's usability czar" (WebReference.com)
• "the reigning guru of Web usability" (FORTUNE)
• "eminent Web usability guru" (CNN)
• "perhaps the best-known design and usability guru on the Internet" (Financial Times)
• "the usability Pope" (Wirtschaftswoche Magazine, Germany)
• "new-media pioneer" (Newsweek)

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). Before starting NNG in 1998 he was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer.

Dr. 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.

• Publication and patent list
• Interviews and press coverage
• Scans of selected cover stories and feature stories

Column

Alertbox column on Web usability, published on the Internet since 1995 (current readership: 11 million page views per year).

Books

• Prioritizing Web Usability, 2006
• Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed, 2001 (113 guidelines for homepage design)
• Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, 2000: a quarter million copies in print; 22 languages
• International User Interfaces, 1996 (co-editor with with Elisa del Galdo)
• Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond, 1995: second edition of textbook on linked online information
• Advances in Human-Computer Interaction Vol. 5, 1995 (editor)
• Usability Engineering, 1994: textbook on the methods needed to make interfaces easier to use
• Usability Inspection Methods, 1994 (co-editor with Robert L. Mack): with chapters by each of the inventors of these methods
• Hypertext and Hypermedia, 1990: the first edition of classic textbook (no longer in print)
• Designing User Interfaces for International Use, 1990 (editor)
• Coordinating User Interfaces for Consistency, 1989 (editor): still the best book on how to get a standard look-and-feel (reprint edition published 2002)

Professional Background

Jakob Nielsen holds a Ph.D. in human-computer interaction from the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen.

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.

Dr. Nielsen's earlier affiliations include Bellcore (Bell Communications Research), the Technical University of Denmark, and the IBM User Interface Institute at the T.J. Watson Research Center.

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.

Professional journal editorial board memberships: Behaviour & Information Technology, Foundations and Trends in Human-Computer Interaction, Interacting with Computers, Journal of Usability Studies (JUS), International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. For each journal, contact the editor-in-chief to submit a manuscript.

In June 2000, Dr. Nielsen was inducted into the Scandinavian Interactive Media Hall of Fame. In April 2006, he was inducted into the ACM Computer-Human Interaction Academy.

Profiles

Some profiles and interviews on other sites:

E-consultancy Interview with Jakob Nielsen

Builder.au Developer Spotlight: Jakob Nielsen

Digital Web Magazine An interview with Dr. Jakob Nielsen, usability expert

PixelSurgeon Jakob Nielsen Interview

IT-Director Jakob Nielsen on usability and intranets

eLearningPost Jakob Nielsen on e-learning

WebReference Jakob Nielsen Interview

SitePoint Interview - Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D.

CIO A Discussion with Jakob Nielsen and Vincent Flanders

IT Conversations Jakob Nielsen podcast

CIO Insight Time for a Redesign: Dr. Jakob Nielsen

Parodies

Many sites have made fun of me. Here are some of the more funny ones:

US Press News Jakob Nielsen Declares the Letter "C" Unusable

NTK.net Nielsen for 2004 - At Least We'll Know Who Won This Time (Actually, I can't run for President, being born overseas. But Governor sounds nice, and I don't even has as much of an accent as the last guy to win here in California.)

Davezilla Jakob Nielsen’s Usability Fighting Styles (Note that I am originally from Denmark, not Sweden, so associating me with Swedish meatballs is a bit offensive - everybody knows that Danish meatballs taste better.)

GroGraphics Jakob Nielsen's review of Magritte's "The Betrayal of Images"

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Dr. Jakob Nielsen
Nielsen Norman Group
48105 Warm Springs Blvd.
Fremont, CA 94539-7498
USA
Contact:
Office: Luice Hwang, tel. (415) 682-0688
Website: http://www.useit.com